


Sister

by Espernyan



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: A squad can be a home, Avoiding Difficult Subjects, BUSINESS AS USUAL IN THE IMPERIAL GUARD, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Comrades in Arms, F/F, Faith & Fire, Fantasy Racism (MC struggles with 'Eldar good' as a concept for a bit), Found Family?, Friendship, Gen, Home is where your NCO tells you it is, Injury, Insecurity, Kissing, LGBT characters, Lesbians in Space, Literal War, Multi, POV Lesbian Character, Soldiers, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:17:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19771894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Espernyan/pseuds/Espernyan
Summary: The memoirs of Sister Yvie Novia Solaris of the Order of the Gilded Lily, whose career, as you'll see, started off with something of a bang.Separated from her Sisters-in-Arms, the rookie's prospects seem rather grim, but war is seldom a matter of individual heroism in a vacuum, and a squad from the 36th Elysian is happy to take on a Sister Militant and a Sister Hospitaler as auxiliaries.Alongside her fellow members of Eighth Squad, she soldiers on.You don't have to be big into 40k lore or anything to enjoy this, according to a few friends who aren't and thus far have.





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a big Sororitas fangirl, and, given all my previous 40k stuff has been embarrassing or heretical [I can't believe I called the Eldar and the IoM teaming up] quests, which I'm quite bad at doing, I had an urge a few months ago, wrote the intro chapter, and then, after listening to the All Guardsmen Party, came back to it and sort of went at it. 
> 
> I'm not especially caught-up on the lore; I found out about the fall of Cadia when I was fluffing out one Sister Ophelia Fairfax, a vat-grown Seraphim, for a game of Rogue Trader, and I remembered Saint Celestine and knew she had to be a fan of that glorious winged babe. So I went to the wiki to brush up on the details, and saw that actually Celestine was back and being rad again, and that was pretty exciting. 
> 
> So- here we are. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I seem to have enjoyed writing it. Yvie's a bit of a card.

I was nineteen years and three weeks old when I got my first taste of real combat. Of what war is really like.

Scores of my fellow Sisters filled our humble shuttle’s troop compartment, each of us busy- each of us contributing to set the space abuzz with activity. Our voices, light and sweet, filled the air with hymns and litanies, the quiet murmurings of the occasional conversation only serving to underline our songs-- to emphasize them and mask the low hum of our vessel’s engine so that my Sisters and I were all you heard.

We were a sea of righteousness and powered armor, resplendent to a woman, each of us clad in a suit of lilac-accented, silver-painted ceramite. Every golden fleur-de-lis gleamed as though the machine spirits themselves were aglow with pride; every Battle-Sister clutched a weapon truly fit to see use as an instrument of our God-Emperor’s divine will.

I had my Godwyn-De’az pattern boltgun hinged open in my lap, the upper and lower receivers forming a right angle as I anointed moving parts and wear surfaces with blessed unguents, carefully inspecting locking-surfaces, cam-grooves, and the lugs which interacted with both as I went. Palatine Croix – my commanding officer, her rank would equate roughly to a lieutenant or captain, I think – placed a hand on my shoulder as I was performing the Rite of Function-Checking.

When I looked up from my weapon, Croix was bent forward, grinning down at me. She was, I thought, really quite the fetching woman – she had big, brown eyes, a bright smile, and skin the color of butterscotch. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy bun, loose strands abound, and her face was near enough I could have pressed a kiss to the cute little hook-shaped scar on her nose.

“Are you nervous, Sister Yvie?” She asked me.

I thumbed a thirty-third cartridge into the magazine I intended to load my bolter with. Different Orders issued different styles and sizes of magazines for the Godwyn-De’az, and the Order of the Gilded Lily’s issued mags were constructed of a heavy-gauge sheet-metal stamping, durable, simple, and a little more generous in terms of capacity than most. Nominally, they were 35-shot magazines, but seasoned Sisters and Tech-Priests alike had advocated for only loading them with 32 rounds apiece, both to ease the burden on the follower-springs and for ease of use in the field.

“You could say that,” I quipped, “or you could say I hadn’t realized it was possible to be shaking in my boots in power armor. Either works, really.”

Flicking my weapon’s selector lever from the disassembly position to SAFE was as simple as a brush of my thumb – a stroke of my thumb? Either works, really, it’s just odd to describe movements like that when power armor comes into the equation. Things like flicking selector switches go from ‘having enough resistance to ensure it isn’t flipped on accident’ to ‘if this strength amplification could be applied to a sneeze, then I would be able to sneeze the selector lever into position’.

Ah, but I digress.

I loaded the chosen magazine into my boltgun, pulled the charging-handle to the rearmost extent of its travel, and released it, allowing the bolt and carrier to cycle forward under spring-tension and strip the first cartridge from the magazine, feed it into the chamber, and _CLUNK_ home, the bolt locking into the front trunnion, leaving the firing-pin cocked and the weapon in battery.

From the seat to my left, Sister Superior Brisien – our squad lead – chuckled and shifted her grip on her meltagun. “Good. Those nerves’ll keep you alive, Yvie.”

Unfortunately, she was entirely right about that.

Palatine Croix was opening her mouth to say something when the world shuddered and shook and filled with smoke and fire as a great, metallic screech tore through the shuttle’s hull. I don’t know for certain, but I think I was screaming. Croix definitely was. The whatever-that-was had deafened me enough that I couldn’t hear it, but her screaming face was right in front of me.

I managed a prayer to the God-Emperor before I blacked out, but nothing more.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which several people get befriended with extreme prejudice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "BIG SIS SAYS HECK CHAOS!"  
> -A dear friend of mine. Like a little brother, really.

I have since learned that the Eldar – some of the Eldar? I’m not entirely certain – are our allies, comrades who gladly rendered assistance to holy Saint Celestine herself, and subsequently Roboute Guilliman _hims_ elf; I feel this bears mention because several of the curses I uttered upon my waking involved… rather _unscrupulous_ Eldar maids, shall we say.

Admittedly, I even still find it rather difficult to trust xenos fi- the _other races_ of our galaxy. I have met Eldar who were very pretty and very polite, but who also treated me as if I were a little girl – though is suppose they may well have thought I was – and bluesk- _Tau_ who seemed really quite sweet, but also very, _very_ obviously under some terribly potent sort of manipulation. I have also met Eldar who looked and acted like some variety of _extremely_ niche prostitute, save for the disturbingly psychopathic behaviours they exhibited, which rather more reminded me of the most dangerous sort of heretical swine I’ve ever encountered. Hostile Tau, I have never met in close quarters, but only because, when confronted on the field, Tau scatter in a manner the likes of which I have only ever seen from Commissary cadets at the Schola, when an instructor would storm out onto the scrumball pitch – every time they would flee, for every time they knew some kind of prank had been pulled.

I almost wonder if the instructors did that on purpose, to teach those cadets to seek cover and go to ground, as certain heroes of the Imperium might well have advised them. Even we noviates of the Sororitas, after all, had heard plenty about the ways Commissars most often met their ends – overt displays of courage, and overt displays of the Emperor’s distaste for those who abuse their power to put down their fellow man, generally in the form of artillerymen not bothering to vox their regimental Commissars before commencing a barrage, often after having their ears chewed off one too many times for issuing just such a warning.

To any cadets reading this, know this: we of the Sisterhood, known for our unshakable zeal, do not _execute_ our Sisters for emotional displays or mistakes made under stress. Sisters who are pinned or routed have been pinned and routed for good reason, and require support to rally once more. The Guardsmen you will likely be attached to are Human, and if you cannot remember this, it will likely be _they_ who grant _you_ the Emperor’s benediction, and it will be nobody’s fault but your own.

The God-Emperor loves idiots well and truly, but _malignant_ idiots are punished each and all.

Then again, we are also well-known as preachy, and, well– there it is, huh?

… We are not, however, known for avoiding painful subjects, as I am this very moment. My apologies.

My return to consciousness was met with much rejoicing.

Gutteral, vox-corrupted guffaws, maniacal and wicked.

Still wreathed in power armor, I was being held upside-down by the ankle. Held up by a ceramite-clad hand which made my calf look and feel like it belonged to a toy doll. My hair brushed the dirt, and I saw my own grey eyes reflected off of a sliver of polished metal lodged into the knee-joint of my captor’s colossal suit of war-marred power armor.

“Emperor deliver me.” I prayed, and tried in vain to squirm free of the giant’s grasp.

My captor laughed and hoisted me higher, so I could look into his eyes.

“PERHAPS,” rumbled the Traitor Marine, who pulled off his helmet with the hand I wasn’t dangling from, “YOU SHOULD FIND A REAL GOD, LITTLE GIRL.”

He was even uglier than his soul must have been, but I suppressed the urge to insult his mother. Instead, I smiled sweetly, and said, “Golly, mister, you make a very tempting offer! Do you have a brochure?”

His comrades laughed at him, voices as deep and distorted as his- there must have been a half-dozen of them behind me, because apparently oath-breaking Space Marines have more in common with jackals than I had previously realized.

My stomach sunk – rose, really, given I was upside-down – as the heretic, too, smiled, the corners of his lips curling upwards with more venom and menace than I knew possible. “I THINK I HAVE SOMETHING EVEN BETTER. LET ME SHOW YOU.”

He tossed his helmet underhand to one of his friends, then passed me into his other hand, so he could turn me around without letting go of me – and inadvertently allow me to catch a glimpse of my bolter, hanging by its sling from a protruding bit of rubble. This also let me see a swathe of destroyed rockcrete buildings and jagged hunks of metal which, combined with the burning trees and pillars of roiling black smoke, rather informed me that our pilot hadn’t been able to land the shuttle with the delicate grace of a Seraphim’s kiss.

Emperor on Earth, what I wouldn’t have given for a squad of our avenging angels right about then.

It was as he finished turning me completely around that I truly understood the wickedness of those who turned from the light of our God-Emperor.

Beyond the comrades of my captor, most of whom menaced with spikes or chains or other such accouterments, traitor Guard and heretical Marines roamed the stretch of devastated cityscape, amidst shattered structures and the broken bodies of dozens of my Sisters. Even as we watched, a traitor Marine some meters out passed by a downed building and had his legs mostly-vaporized by the blast of a meltagun.

I barked out a laugh as his body crashed to the ground, and, disturbingly, his comrades joined me, even as my Sister’s follow-up shot erased most of his upper arm, torso, and jaw.

As I watched, the distant rattle of gunfire resolved itself into clarity as my senses began to fully return to me. The bark of bolters responded to the crack of lasguns and the relative yipping of autoguns, and meltaguns and flamers hissed and bit like snakes at any heretics who strayed too close to what I then realized were pockets of resistance– pockets of my sisters-in-arms!

The Marine shook me by the leg, perhaps realizing that hope was blossoming in my heart, and boomed, “NOT THERE, CLOSER.” He shook me again, harder this time. “SINCE YOU LOVE CORPSES SO MUCH.”

Fool that I was, I directed my gaze downwards, and let the sight hit me like a blow.

“Palatine Croix,” I whimpered, my throat tightening as hot tears blurred my vision.

Her body was… mangled. Bloody and distorted, her armor shredded in places, scorched in others, and simply bent out of shape in others. A piece of twisted metal, thicker and wider than my clenched fist, protruded through her breast, and was clearly the instrument of her demise.

“THIS IS THE ONLY REWARD THAT AWAITS THOSE IN SERVICE TO THE FALSE EMPEROR, LITTLE GIRL.”

White-hot fury flared up within me as I gazed at my superior’s broken body, and I lashed out at the corrupted Marine who carried me, but I couldn’t reach him, and my struggles died down quickly.

His voice softened, then, and he lowered it to relatively normal levels. “Which of us would you rather join, child?”

I wanted to suggest, in response, that he ought to kiss the muzzle of a meltagun, introduce a flamer where the sun chastely neglects to shine, and have a nice shave with a chainsword. When I tried to voice my opinions, however, all that came out were choked sobs.

For several minutes, he lectured me about the glory of Chaos, his chiding tone disturbingly-reminiscent of one of my tutors at the Schola.

His comrades, humorously-enough, seemed rather sympathetic to my plight, presumably having been recipients of his lectures themselves. They exchanged glances, offered exasperated shrugs, and tried, albeit with no success, to prompt the man to move on.

“CONSIDER THE PRESTIGE OF BEING ONE OF THE FEW SISTERS TO OPEN HER EYES TO THE GLORY OF THE TRUE GODS.”

I had calmed, by then, of course.

“I’d rather be intimate with your mum, if I’m honest.” I replied.

He didn’t seem to take this the way I’d meant, because he smiled, more amicably this time, and said, “THAT COULD BE ARRANGED.”

That left me at a loss for words, I’ll admit.

Part of what got my grox was the fact that the traitor hadn’t even felt the need to disarm me – my boltpistol, grenades, ammunition, and sarissa were all where they belonged in my webgear. I hadn’t been carrying a chainsword (though, in hindsight, perhaps I should have been), and my bolter was suspended from some rubble off to the side, but he knew he could tear me apart with his bare hands if I tried anything, and he knew that I knew it, too.

In the end, however, this proved to be a fatal mistake, as the crack of a lasgun, and a spray of crimson from a las-bolt that had grazed his head and done an unkindness to his ear, presaged his startled cry… and his reflexive move to cover his shiny new head-wound, a motion which involved his dropping whatever happened to be in his hand at the time.

And that happened to be me.

For an instant, I was stunned, but I caught myself before I hit the ground, regaining my composure and springing into action. I found my feet and lunged past my captor as more las-fire peppered him to little effect, and stuck one of my krak grenades to his back before making the mad dash towards my weapon. Bolt-shells and vox-corrupted shouts followed, hot on my heels, but surprise, luck, and the God-Emperor were on my side, and the assistance of my power armor certainly didn’t hurt.

I scooped up my bolter and tossed the sling over my head as the Chaos-tainted Marine was made familiar with the effects of general-issue Imperial anti-armor ordnance. That is to say, as he went _ka-boom_.

A hail of bits of Chaos Space Marine pitter-pattered off of my armor as I spun on my heel and fired my bolter from the hip, sending a half-dozen rounds in the general direction of the other Traitor Marines in hopes of suppressing them. By then, they were being harassed with small volleys of las-fire from a squad of Guardsmen holed up in a building a few hundred meters out.

In that moment, I found myself in a position I, rather justifiably, would rather not have been in. I was in a position in which I had to make a choice: stand my ground and try to fight off a squad of Space Marines, or fall back to what was ostensibly a friendly position. There wasn’t time to deliberate- I made my decision and ran with it.

And I ran like frak.

And stopped dead in my tracks when I heard a woman scream bloody murder.

I had covered enough distance that I could actually see the guardsmen look utterly shocked as I whirled around to see a squad of traitor Guard prodding a Sister Hospitaler with their bayonets.

The tainted Space Marines had charged deeper into the strip of shuttle-wasteland to meet a number of my sisters in melee, and had been met with the power swords of a few Celestians, plus chainswords and a few flamers and meltaguns. The Marines were outnumbered, but were also huge supermen, and my fellow Sororitas, frankly, had just crawled out of the wreckage of a shuttle-crash which many of them had probably only barely survived.

Many of our number _hadn’t_ survived, frankly, and I caught sight of at least one Battle-Sister limping along with a Sister Retributor, her arm over the heavy weapon specialist’s shoulders for support.

A knife was driven into the Hospitaler’s thigh, and she screamed- then, the bolt-shells I sent at the man in retribution tore his midsection to shreds, painting my noncombatant Sister in gore, and she calmed. Realistically, it must have been because she recognized someone with a bolter was coming to her aid; however, in the moment, in the heat of a firefight I’d just kicked off, I thought perhaps that she, being splattered in blood and pulped innards, had found that she was in her element as a medic.

An autogun was leveled at the medic, to finish her off, and a lasgun bored a hole through the eye of the woman wielding it, painting the men behind her with the ejecta of her particularly-grisly exit wound.

My guardsmen friends had a sharpshooter amongst them- I was sure of that, then, as a volley of less-accurate las-fire followed, ensuring that the other heretics scattered for cover as I rushed for my Sister.

The enemy had auto- and lasguns, and I had powered armor, a Godwyn-De’az, and all the righteous fury my unshakable faith in the God-Emperor could bestow upon me. Cover be damned, I still liked my odds.

They seemed to like my odds, too, because they were shaking in their boots, and half their shots seemed to go wide even as I affixed my sarissa to the end of my weapon.

I expected they’d find it far less enjoyable when a member of the Adepta Sororitas was jabbing _them_ with a bayonet than they did when the circumstances were reversed.

One oft-overlooked aspect of wearing power armor – possibly because it’s simply not intuitive to describe, and isn’t something most of us who wear it on a regular basis pay any special attention to – is the way it not only supports your body, but stabilizes you. This, just as much as (and, more specifically, _in conjunction with_ ) the servomotor-assistance adding its strength to your every movement, is what allows Battle-Sister and Space Marine alike to run faster, jump higher- to bring heavy weapons to bear without tripod-mounts or sleds, or to keep situational awareness while running full-tilt through an artillery barrage.

What’s less appreciated about it is that it allows the wearer do just about anything while running full-tilt. Reloading, affixing a bayonet, readying a grenade, putting out half-decent suppressive fire– your upper body is completely stable, no matter what nonsense your lower half is getting up to. That’s not to say it’s kept level, or that the armor keeps your balance for you. Far from it, in fact. What it does is isolate the movements and forces and whatever else might be acting on any one part of your body, such that your body dynamics don’t need to be wholly-dedicated to maintaining a dead run.

That’s mostly where it shines and is overlooked. Jumping still sort of requires the whole body, albeit to a lesser extent than normal, and you’ll definitely run faster if you do so the regular old boring way than if you’re reloading and checking your chrono mid-dash, but being able to move fast and do things is a lot more important than you might initially realize, and it’s a skill I expect any Sister or Marine will pick up fairly quickly.

Just thought I’d explain, since I exploited that ability twice in the span of a regulation restroom break. It’s definitely more noticeable when there are actual stakes and legitimately-threatening foes than it is on the sorts of ‘training mission’ purges young Sisters of Orders Militant get sent on to ensure that a young woman knows how to pump a heretic full of exploding bolt-shells, how to use the sarissa properly (like an axe, rather than a spear), and how to differentiate heretical cultists from weirdos, soldiers on leave, civilian men, and any sort of officials or important people. At least the difference between abhumans and mutants was simple enough to teach: if they’re just a hairy person, or very short or very tall, they’re probably just abhumans; if they spit acid or fire, have too many arms, have stinging tails, or have extra eyes that aren’t normal-spooky Navigator warp-eyes, they’re probably mutants or xenos that just happen to be kinda human-like.

Once again, however, I digress.

Ironically, the traitor Guard held their ground as I charged them, neither losing morale nor opting to retreat. Just like loyal Guard would have done. Which meant they had deserted, abandoning their service to the only benevolent force in the known universe, for reasons that weren’t the ones you could sort of understand, like, “I watched horrifying xenos eat the Commissar, and decided that the trench was actually not the best place to be, and I couldn’t exactly go back after I realized I had deserted,” and “A huge man with daemon friends told me that my options were to join him or watch his daemon friends eat my soul, so I went with not having my soul eaten.”

Normally, you feel bad for unfortunate lost souls, grant them the Emperor’s Benediction, and trust in the Big E’s divine might to wrest their souls from the jaws of evil as necessary. The God-Emperor is mighty enough that His faithful can work miracles through their faith in Him – I have no clue what he’s personally capable of, but if he can be a beacon to the entire galaxy while also granting millions of Sisters divine aid or the ability to lay on hands, or grow wings and come back from the dead and be dreamy while doing it, he probably files his soul-taxes without much trouble.

The Hospitaler, now finding herself near-entirely ignored by her tormentors, drew a laspistol and shot the man nearest to her in the back.

“For the Emperor!” She cheered, and, though her voice was ill-suited to it, I echoed her war-cry, and fell upon the enemy.

I chopped into a man’s shoulder, demonstrating to him the proper use of the Sisterhood’s traditional bayonet, and he slipped his own bayonet up and into my armpit for my troubles. I let out a pained yelp and cuffed him about the head on reflex, sending the bastard sprawling, either unconscious or dead – I wasn’t especially concerned which. Open-hand strikes, it turned out, were made quite devastating by a ceramite palm and augmented strength.

The knife in my underarm was quite painful, and would later leave a scar, but adrenaline, righteous indignation, and zealous hate made it easy for me to leave it for later, and I raised my bolter to gun down another heretic.

Honestly, whatever would I do? A minor battle-scar, earned in a well-meaning – if not exactly heroic – charge, from my daring (I guess?) solo rescue of a Sister Hospitaler who was being bayoneted by a gaggle of heretic scum? Truly, this hideous disfigurement would never impress any woman, _ever_ , because, as we all know, small, well-healed scars in out-of-the-way places-

No, yeah, you’re right. That gag’s tired already.

In seriousness, though? You would not believe how hard it is to make people understand that, _no, really, the Guard not only helped, but were instrumental in keeping the rescuee alive_. The zealous charge of the lone rookie Sister was more romantic, and sharpshooters weren’t cool or sexy at all, apparently. I understand that I was the one who ran in and got stabbed and what-not, but I was also the one with the bolter and the power armor, and the one who wasn’t a few hundred meters away.

And, in hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t be implying things when I’m about to tell you about the pretty Sister Hospitaler, who happens to be the whole story’s primary source of being a pretty Sister Hospitaler. Call me old-fashioned, but pretty Hospitalers are pretty great. I think the entire Guard probably agrees with me on that, aside from maybe a few ladies here and there, and perhaps the occasional irritated medicae.

Another volley of las-fire reached out and killed someone, and I vowed to buy those guardsmen drinks, and a nice bottle of amasec for their marksman. I didn’t really get paid, per se, but I had an… allowance, sort of? A stipend, maybe. And I was fairly confident I’d be able to figure something out.

Had I been more perceptive, I probably would have noticed the company or so of Traitor Guard marching up the way at about this point in the engagement. Had I been perceptive at all, I might’ve at least heard the engines of their technicals.

Unfortunately, my powers of awareness seemed to be limited to noticing active gunfights within a half-kilometer or so, and not even that when I was _drowsy_. And I had tried very hard not to look a gift grox in the mouth when the Chaos Space Marines hadn’t bothered with me; the thought that they weren’t concerned because they had reinforcements on the way had very much not occurred.

Perhaps inspired by the valiant counter-attack by their comrade, the heretics rallied. Two of them, including one with a support weapon that seemed to be some variety of autogun – rather an unusual sort of thing, really, from my perspective – began firing to suppress the distant guardsmen’s position, while the remaining three fellows swarmed me. As I turned to face the attacker I could see, the androgynous individual in question tried to wallop me over the head with an entrenching tool.

Their attack was a bit short, but the follow-up swipe managed to open a gash in my face before I repaid them with a burst of bolter rounds to the stomach for their trouble. That very nearly tore them in half, and rendered them quite incapacitated. They spat something vile at me as they died, but it was mostly blood, bile, and gibberish.

A spray of bullets splattered ineffectually against my back, and I regretted my decision not to carry a chainsword when I heard a tell-tale revving noise behind me. And then felt something bite into my neck protector, whine as it stalled, and fry itself. The heretic let out a colorful curse as I rounded on her, throwing an elbow into her face with the movement.

The ceramite-reinforced joint knocked out a majority of her teeth, and sent her sprawling to the dirt, where the Hospitaler calmly shot the thrashing, screaming heretic to death.

I liked her already.

… Had I already said that?

The last of the heretics swarming me seemed to realize he had made questionable life choices, and emptied his pistol, point blank, into my side. A stabbing pain shot up my spine as a bullet made it through my armor and embedded itself partially into a rib on my left, and I roared and finished turning to face him, whipping my sarissa across his sternum as he clobbered me over the head with his emptied pistol.

His blow was enough to stagger me, and, to his credit, he pressed the advantage, chest wound or no, and punched me in the jaw. He was a wiry fellow, mind. Dirt-streaked and messy-haired, with wild blue eyes and desperation etched deep into his features. Once, he might have been quite athletic, his physique maintained by the Imperial Guard’s hearty – if not especially delicious – rations and PT regimen.

In that moment, however, he was no stronger than I was – deserters don’t get rations and don’t have NCOs to make them do their push-ups – and I was the one wearing power armor.

His punch absolutely _had_ hurt, especially considering the fresh shovel-wound stretching from my cheekbone to that region between nostril and upper lip, and his follow-up managed to black my right eye, but I simply let go of my bolter, allowing it to hang by its sling, and swatted his third blow aside near-effortlessly. He raised his guard, surely anticipating me throwing a punch in return, but I instead drew my boltpistol and put two rounds through his chest.

“Block _that_!” I dared him, over the familiar ringing in my ears.

Once I was no longer being harried in close quarters, I quickly executed the two traitors who were bravely providing covering fire for the comrades that had been variously splattered across my armor, their backs to me, their cover providing protection only from the squad of guardsmen who, by this point, were my new best friends.

Bolt-shells, even pistol-caliber ones, do not do nice things to Human heads.

I hurried over to the Hospitaler, taking a moment to reload my boltgun as I moved. I slung the blessed thing as soon as I was close enough to see that the heretic’s bayonet had penetrated her sanctified Hospitaler carapace deeply enough that this Sister of mine wasn’t going to be doing any sort of movement quicker than a limp, and certainly not running anywhere or making any mad dashes.

Hospitaler carapace, I should clarify, is a suit of carapace _armor_ , and not some sort of protective shell which Sisters Hospitaler grow upon reaching maturity or somesuch – it comes off and everything, I’ve seen it. Hell, I’ve helped Hospitalers out of the stuff a couple times. _Injured_ Hospitalers, I mean, aside from a couple times I’d helped greener novitiates with their clasps after their first PT in armor, but being an embarrassed gay schoolgirl and helping another embarrassed schoolgirl out of her armor was, frankly, more difficult. Mostly by virtue of trying not to look, despite the poor thing being not only fully-dressed, but also clad in high-tech plate armor, and most certainly being far less concerned with her idiot senior seeing her back than with the 20 kilos of armaplas and ceramite weighing her down.

She took the hand I offered her and let me hoist her upright, grunting in pain as I did so.

“Thanks for the save.” She said, and gave a sort of half-nod, the somewhat-dusty fabric of her habit rustling a little. Her voice, as before, was sweet, kind, and a little breathy. Ill-suited to battle-cries, but probably very adept at calming down wounded, and making hearts flutter.

“Thanks for the assist,” I countered, and she batted her eyelashes at me- pinned me in place for a split-second with beautiful violet eyes.

It was the Hospitaler who noticed the actual frakking _company_ of ‘mechanized’ Traitor Guard infantry, still a few hundred meters away from being within prime lasgun range – which was, itself, about a hundred meters.

“We’ve got incoming,” she said, indicating the distant-but-not-as-distant-as-I-would-have-liked column with a tilt of her head, “do you have a plan?”

I blinked, followed her gesture, and cursed under my breath. “It’s probably not a plan if I have to ask if it qualifies, is it?” I joked, and I swear I could _see_ the urge to switch to Medic Voice flash across her features. It was enough to make me start talking, that’s for sure.

“I figured I’d meet up with those guardsmen over there,” I explained, pointing towards the friendlies with my chin- my hands were occupied with supporting a wounded Sister and reloading my sidearm- and concluding, “I may not have a plan, but they might. Even if they don’t-”

“-It’s better than standing around waiting for the Emperor to sort us out.” She finished.

Her gaze wandered to the handful of flatbed groundcars and their pintle-mounted machine-guns. Mostly heavy stubbers, but I spied at least one which had to be a heavy bolter or worse.

Her line of thought was fairly obvious: a lasgun may be most effective within a hundred meters, maybe a hundred and fifty, but a mounted stubber or bolter easily doubles that, maybe even triples. And we were, in her mind, constrained to a hurried limp as our fastest means of locomotion. Possibly because she was aware of the blood running down my left arm and left side, and thus that I was injured- she wasn’t willing to bet on me being able to pick her up and carry her.

It was certainly true that the adrenaline was wearing off, and the bayonet-wound in my armpit was really beginning to make its displeasure known, but I had started my day off by blowing up a Traitor Marine. Relying on _my_ _35kg_ of powered armor to haul my ass, and the ass of a pretty chirurgeon, to safety?

I was prepared, frankly, for the guardsmen, or someone, to ask me how I survived that encounter with the Chaos Marines. I would answer, _“Oh, that’s easy- sheer dumb luck, and just enough sense to know better than to push that luck by sticking around.”_

Trusting in myself and my armor to be able to carry this Hospitaler didn’t feel much like I was pushing any sort of luck.

With that in mind, I swept the medicae off her feet. She yelped in surprise, I bit back a pained whimper, and my side and armpit screamed in protest. On the bright side, my passenger was keenly aware of all of this; as for downsides, my passenger was keenly aware of precisely how much of a wimp I was.

Perhaps that’s a bit vain, but, for some reason – can’t imagine why – I would rather have liked to impress this girl.

She stuck me with an ampule of painkillers, then, and I was feeling much better in short order.

She wrapped her arms around my neck to keep some of her weight off of my left side, which I thought was awfully nice of her, and we made a beeline for friendly territory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pin the anti-tank grenade on the Traitor Marine is a good game, actually.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yvie gets patched up and takes a load off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Order of the Gilded Lily is an Order Minoris, a Lesser Order Militant, and has close ties with its related Orders Hospitaler, Famulous, and Dialogus. I expect that sort of arrangement is probably rather common, but it doesn't seem like the sort of thing anybody's too concerned about, and the galaxy is a very big place.
> 
> Sister Reese is a Hospitaler of their sister Order Hospitaler, which might well just be the Hospitaler 'Order of the Gilded Lily'. She wears the same colors regardless: black, with lavender robes and gold trim.  
> Perhaps they are the Orders of the Gilded Lily? Actually, I quite like sound of that. An' I'm the one in charge of this mess, so I can just declare that to be the case~!
> 
> (For some reason, I tend to type 'galazy' and 'trip' when trying to type 'galaxy' and 'trim'. Though that time I didn't mess up either, funnily enough. When will my fingers stop talking heresy?)

The Enginseer managed to do an impressive job of patching my armor. She had actually _apologized_ for not having the appropriate metallic black paint to blend the patch-job into the armor at large. It had taken longer to get me out of that armor than it had taken her to patch the knife-and-bullet-holes, and she seemed really shaken-up over a matte black patch.

Guardsmen, it turned out, were very understanding when it came to having been drilled to respond to and obey the Medic Voice, and a squad of misfit infantry were doing their best to keep my attention as ‘my’ Hospitaler and their field medic worked to un-puncture me. The medic was a young, dark-haired man, and was busily gluing my cheek back into one contiguous piece of… cheek, while the Hospitaler did mysterious medical things under cover of a carefully-rigged sheet and some remarkably effective localized anesthesia.

The sheet was there to keep me from looking at whatever miracles the Hospitaler was performing on me, I believe. From what little I could feel, that was probably wise – apparently having several inches of bayonet in your body tends to do more damage than just making you bleed a lot, and I was happy not knowing what sorts of tendons or ligaments or whatever she was having to repair.

“Good thing I shave under my arms,” I had joked, because I felt a bit bad about being patched up before introductions had even been made, and was hoping I could go without traumatizing the only allies we had on-hand.

The Hospitaler had agreed, and suggested that it would have been awkward to have to go back and cut out a little blonde hair she’d accidentally left in the wound.

That had prompted the troopers to start actively trying to draw my attention.

“So,” began one woman, “Sister...”

“Yvie,” I supplied. “Sister Yvie, of the Order of the Gilded Lily.”

The riflewoman had brightened up at the realization that I wasn’t one of those recalcitrant zealots, but one of the more personable variety of zealot.

Her accent- well, it wasn’t what I was used to, but somehow it felt far more normal than those of my Sisters-in-Arms. Made me feel a bit posh, frankly.

“So, Yvie, where’re you from?”

One of her fellows elbowed her for dropping the ‘Sister’ without asking, but I wasn’t exactly insecure enough to take offense. I had my fleur-de-lis tattoo and everything, right down to the Chaplet Ecclesiasticus dangling from my shield robes. Unlike some convents, Sisters of my order didn’t tend to carry their copies of the Rule of Sororitas with them into battle or anything so drastic – mine was in my bunk back home, beside my pillow, of course – but I had all the other hallmarks down pat.

“I’m from the Schola,” I replied, “same as everyone else.”

I could feel my own grin, albeit less so than normal – the medic was still touching up my face – and the guardswoman seemed aware that I was being facetious, though it didn’t appear as though she found it especially funny.

In fairness, it’s probably funnier when told to a fellow Sister, because- well, you know. We’re very nearly _all_ from one Schola or another.

“Who’s your friend, then?” Asked another guardsman.

“I’d shrug,” I admitted, “but I can tell she has a scalpel or the like inside my arm and I’m not willing to bleed for the gesture.” I cleared my throat. “I honestly have no idea. We just met.”

“Sister Reese,” the Hospitaler supplied, peeking out from her surgical curtain, “and it’s just a needle and forceps, you big baby.”

“Did you get stabbed and shot for a complete stranger?”

I snorted. “Of course not, I’m not an idiot.” I lied. Mostly as a joke- _mostly_. “Well, I mean- maybe a bit. _But_ she seems very nice, and she _was_ being tortured.”

Sister Reese smiled a smile that told me she was about to say something I wouldn’t like. “You’ll change your tune when I put you in a sling, Blondie.”

“What, is it really that bad?”

She looked at me like I had asked the dumbest question she’d ever heard, batted her eyelashes at me again- she was doing that on purpose, wasn’t she? - and ducked back under the sheet to start… _suturing_.

“I can engage injury securing protocols in her armor,” offered the Enginseer, as if that were helpful.

“Oh, would you?” Reese asked, gratefully, and the techpriestess beeped what I assumed was some variety of affirmative.

I directed a pleading glance at the guardsmen, and one of them, a wiry, dark-skinned man with a lascarbine who gave the subtle impression he was keeping track of every sound he heard, asked, “I don’t reckon there’s a polite way to ask this, Sister, but- are you in command, or is Sarge?”

For a moment, I blinked at the man, then directed a glance which was probably half-incredulous and half-terrified at the squad’s Non-Commissioned Officer. Then, I looked back at the man I realized was probably their scout, and said, “The Sergeant looks like the entry for ‘Sergeant’ in my dictionary, and I haven’t been nineteen for a month. I think I’ll take orders from him, if that’s alright.”

The scout nodded, hopefully satisfied. I found him a bit hard to read, to be honest. I also found the techpriestess rather fetching, though, so I took his being inscrutable with a grain of salt.

The NCO was, as I had said, a fairly stereotypical-looking sort of man. Fair skin, square jaw, dark hair buzzed short – he was broad-shouldered and, in contrast to the sort of lean muscle typical of soldiers, quite muscular. He wore a carapace breastplate over his short-sleeved fatigues, and carried a heavy laspistol and a chainsword; like myself and many of my Sisters, he didn’t wear a helmet – as you surely know, the grace of the God-Emperor protects the heads of officers, Sisters, and hat-wearers alike, and it really helps morale when you can see the faces of your commanders. (For us Sisters, there’s also the matter of helmets being in slightly short supply, because helmet repairs are actually fairly time-consuming.)

He stepped over to me and introduced himself. “Sergeant Sevens, Elysian 36th Drop Troops.” With a bit of a lopsided grin and a slight shrug of his shoulders, he put a firm, reassuring hand on my right, unharmed shoulder, and added, “Welcome to Eighth Squad.”

There was something fatherly about the touch, a sort of calming effect to his presence in general which seemed to be amplified by the gesture. He took a step back and let the field medic get back to work on my face.

“Reese, I think we just got drafted,” I quipped, and the Hospitaler snorted beneath my surgical curtain.

“Don’t make me laugh when I’m suturing,” she chided, but I could hear the smile in her voice.

“How’s her arm doing?” Asked the Sergeant.

“Well,” answered Reese, “you _could_ say that it’s a fair bit better than it could have been. You could also say it’s quite a bit worse than it could have been. I’d call it… _inconvenient_. It’s not too terrible, but neither is it especially great. What’s worse, I’m going to have to convince a _Sister Militant_ not only to not use her bolter, but also to try and avoid aggravating an injury.”

I grimaced at this, and tried to stay very still for the man treating my blackened eye. “For how long?”

Much to my chagrin, she opted not to answer this question.

With a fingertip, the medic applied a dab of medicine along my eyebrow, telling me it would prevent excessive swelling, then offered an apologetic smile and eased my upper half free of my robes. Or- the rest of the way free, at any rate.

Nobody oggled me or pointed and laughed at my admittedly-plain brassiere, though one of the marksman, the younger woman, whistled appreciatively, and shot finger-guns and a wink my way when my face heated.

Reese glued my armpit’s incision shut, then sewed the wound shut for good measure. She finished by applying a length of adhesive gauze which started fairly high up on my ribcage, and ended a couple centimeters along the underside of my arm.

I tried not to notice the way her fingertips lingered on my side each time she ran them over the bandage to ensure it was well and truly stuck. Tried being the operative word, there. Had it not been for the localized anesthesia, the delicate touch would probably have sent a shiver up my spine.

The little curtain was done away with when she finished there, and she and the medic moved on to the bullet lodged lower down my side. They worked quickly and with remarkable coordination on this wound, and had the bullet out (and stashed away, probably to give to me as a trophy later) in what seemed like no time at all. While my ribs were inspected for breaks by way of delicate Hospitaler fingertips, the medic closed the entry wound and quickly sewed it shut. Then, the two of them wrapped a field dressing around my midsection, quite firmly securing the padded bit in place.

Reese dusted her hands. “There. You want me to kiss it better, Blondie?”

In an attempt to pretend I didn’t very much want that, I asked, “Are you flirting with me with an untreated knife-wound in your thigh?”

“It’s nothing serious,” she argued as the medic helped get me back into the upper portion of my robes, “it just needs disinfectant and bandaging.”

The medic eyeballed the Hospitaller’s leg armor, raised an eyebrow, and then looked at me. “Liam Tudor,” he said at length, and offered a hand, which I took.

“Yvie Novia Solaris,” I said, and shook the man’s hand. “I can get her out of that armor with one hand and my teeth, if need be-” I paused, realized I’d said something potentially misleading, and clarified, “What I mean to say is, you have to put tension on the end of the straps to undo them. If you’re the one wearing it, it’s a two-handed operation, but I can do it without moving my _confiscated arm_ any.”

“Please keep the biting to a minimum.” Said Reese.

I shrugged as best I could and tried to make a helpless sort of expression. “I make no promises.”  


* * *

At length, Sarge gestured towards an arrangement of sandbags against the 'back' wall. "Solaris, get some shut-eye. Donal, you too."

The rookie trooper, Donal, pulled off his light carapace helmet and un-slung his Accatran-pattern lasgun as he headed for the (admittedly fairly welcoming) sandbags. He stationed the items nearby, so as to be quickly at hand whenever he might be roused, and I followed suit, easing my own 'broomhandled' Theopoia-pattern bolt-pistol from its holster on my armor and into the secondary one on my belt.

The makeshift couch was quite low to the ground - its seat was two bags deep - and I quickly realized that I was really going to be a burden on these poor Elysians.

The medics had rigged up a sling for my left arm with practiced ease - a triangle bandage served as its main bulk, and the rest was mostly straps. It was secure enough to remind me that I was Not to use the arm, which I reckoned was about as much the purpose of the thing as keeping the arm in a safe and stable position.

I smiled apologetically. "Could you... help me down?"

It was hard not to wince at my own request- in that moment, I felt utterly pathetic. But Donal nodded and grasped my forearm, and I his, and eased me down onto the 'cushion'.

Another aspect of soldiering, one seemingly common to the Guard and the Sororitas, is getting whatever sleep you can manage to. We combat-focused Progena were trained to do so even during our later years at the Schola Progenium; for Guardsmen, it tends to be rather more informally-learned, with troopers simply becoming accustomed to sporadic sleep.

That is to say, Donal and I leaned against one another, I draped my arm across his shoulders, and we were asleep.

When I woke up, there was a Hospitaler using me as a pillow, and the medic and one of the sharpshooters had piled on on the far side of Donal.

This left me in rather an awkward position- I didn’t have enough arms at my disposal to ease my way out of the pile of probably very justifiably-tired bodies. The early morning light outside the windows would have been beautiful, I think, had it not been for the great pillars of smoke that rose into the sky here and there, marking this world out as an active battlefield.

The less flirtatious of the squad’s two sharpshooters, an older (for a guardsman, that is- he was probably in his mid-to-late twenties) man, chuckled good-naturedly. He didn’t turn to look at me when he spoke. Hell, he didn’t stop slowly sweeping his gaze back and forth across the world outside our halfway bombed-out (crashed-out, technically) haven of rockcrete and little else. Everything but the rockcrete metastructure had been burned away by the cataclysmic event that was a shuttle-crash.

“What was going through your head? When you stuck that Marine, I mean.”

“Nothing especially coherent,” I answered truthfully, “I just knew that I had places to be. _Anywhere else_ , for example.”

He snorted. “If you could’ve said something to him in that moment-”

“Get frakked,” I replied without hesitation. “I would have told him to get frakked.”

“Careful, Sister,” the marksman exaggeratedly cautioned, “with that sort of attitude, Simmons’ll really take a shine to you.”

Sister Reese shifted and whimpered a little in my lap, and I began idly stroking her hair, which, fortunately, seemed to calm her.

“I’m not especially worried,” I admitted with a shrug. “A little teasing’s nothing new.” I twirled a lock of dyed-white hair around my finger, and glanced down at the Hospitaler it belonged to.

“I’m a little surprised at how… _affectionate_ this one’s been.”

“You _did_ save her life.”

“Anyone would have,” I argued, “it was the right thing to do. Besides, _you_ saved her, too, when you shot the traitor who was going to execute her.”

“That’s easy to say, sure, but you’re the one who actually did it. And got shot, stabbed, punched, and whacked with a shovel for your troubles. As for your fire support- that was Simmons, actually. I was keeping an eye on your Traitor Marine friends.”

“Ah.” I blinked. “Probably a good call.”

At that, the man chuckled. “Lucky for us, your Sisters with the power swords really got their attention.”

Reflexively, I leaned forward. “How’d they fare?”

“They managed a sort of fighting retreat,” he reported, “gave about as good as they got. I could only watch them so far, though.”

A sigh of relief escaped me. “Good,” I breathed, “better to live and fight on than die a hero, and all that.”

“Isn’t that a bit rich coming from you, Little Miss Heroic Rescue?”

With a grin I couldn’t hide, I ‘complained,’ “Oh, sure. You spend your whole life not dying, but you get stabbed _one time_ -!”

The guardsman snickered. “Getting back to the previous topic– it certainly doesn’t hurt that you turn redder than a Commissariat drill-abbot every time she so much as exists in your general direction.”

My cheeks heated. “Do not!” I retorted, like a slightly more mature rendition of the classic schoolgirl, ‘Nuh-uh!’

“Oh, you absolutely do.”

Pouting was difficult with the glue-join in my cheek, and the sharpshooter wasn’t looking my direction to appreciate my efforts anyways, but I did my best, and that’s what matters.

When I offered to relieve the man, he laughed at me, told me to ‘go the hell back to sleep,’ and indicated that ‘that’s what the gun servitor is for.’

A little part of my mind wondered if cuddling with the techpriestess, and the entire squad – sans servitor, of course – was the logical conclusion of this whole series of events. It considered that while her mechadendrites seemed very hug-capable, they might also be cold to the touch, and her cyber-mantle was probably a fairly hard and irregular thing in terms of physical contact.

Sister Reese curled up a bit closer to my side, head still pillowed in my lap, and, distantly, an aching in the back of my head made me realize I had a black eye to sleep off.

And so I did.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reese has it pretty bad for Yvie already, and Yvie is the only one who struggles with this concept.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang scarper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think that even the 'sanitized' versions of Cain's memoirs contain a lot of solid advice and wisdom, and get across ideas like 'retreat is a valid option in a lot of situations,' or 'Commissars are supposed to be a boon, not a burden, to morale, and we can do that by enforcing discipline rather than fearful obedience'.
> 
> Most folk don't fight because they hate the enemy, but because they love the people around and behind them.

Daintily, I nursed my canteen cup of instant recaf. The daintiness was quite deliberate; power armor fingertips can have a bit of trouble gripping a sheet-tin cup, and the beverage was piping hot.

The Elysian 36th may have issued light carapace armor as standard, but the _real_ prime kit lurked in the details. Electric camp stoves? Just slick as all get-out. They heated evenly, were issued two to a squad, and seemed to be set up to use any sort of power source available to mankind as a species. A lasgun power-pack slot – and, in the same indentation, rotated 90 degrees, a slot for las _pistol_ power cells. There was a slot for a generator output, a port that a techpriest could use to power the thing with their own potenta coil, a small reservoir for if you had promethium on hand, and a trio of spaces where rechargeable lamp-packs could be used in sequence to power the thing.

Apparently the Departmento Munitorum was really keen on getting drop troops their morning recaf.

In fairness, I suppose I’d be more eager to jump out of an airborne shuttle after my morning tea. Or, rather- I’d be even less eager to take that plunge than usual if I _hadn’t_ had it.

Of course, my new comrades had immediately begun jeering and calling me a sissy the moment I had pulled a plain packet with ‘TEA’ printed on, in big, black lettering, from my ration pack.

If I was to be serving with the Imperial Guard – they weren’t quite willing to call me a guardsmen just yet, possibly because I didn’t have a las- _anything_ and that simply didn’t sit well in their olive drab hearts – they insisted I ought to drink recaf, like a ‘proper soldier’.

Now, some people might tell you that the name ‘recaf’ implies that the substance was once _DE_ -caffeinated and subsequently ‘re-caffeinated’.

Those people, I can tell you with certainty, have never even _smelled_ a cup of recaf.

Recaf is a caffeinated beverage, made with some variety of bean, which is then infused with caffeine from another source. It’s caffeinated naturally, then caffeinated again for good measure.

They let me drink tea instead after I began to cry a quarter of the way into my cup.

Reese gave me some form of detoxification drug while Simmons apologized, and I felt better after I threw up a little. No harm done, really. When I was done, the Hospitaler took the little bag, tied it shut, and, as I was about to ask what was to be done about it, passed it off to the red-robed Enginseer, who took it with one mechadendrite and promptly incinerated it with a second.

The smell of freshly-burned promethium was a balm to me, and, not fifteen minutes later,between nibbles on a strip of salt-cured grox – which the guardsmen recognized as ‘bacon’, and heartily approved of, both because it featured fairly frequently in their own rations, and because a few of them seemed to think I was a tad ‘too lean’ – I asked after the mechanical limb and its flamer.

“It is a ballistic mechadendrite.” She cheerfully explained. Lowering the gun-tentacle so its firing end – no pun intended – was sat at chest-height before her, she began explaining components. “The promethium is fed via a pressurized hose, located within the central channel of the mechadendrite body, along with circuitry for the varmint-las and the unit itself.”

“Right, to keep the stream consistent and avoid dribbling burning promethium all over the place.” I made a point of not speaking with food in my mouth, of course – techpriests in particular aren’t fond of ‘excessive mastication’ – but I was quite peckish, and, as such, feared I wouldn’t be the best conversation partner.

The coggirl didn’t appear to mind, though. I got the impression she was happy to have someone who actually listened to her tech-talk.

“Precisely,” she replied, bobbing her head as she very rapidly braided her dark-reddish hair.

“So- _varmint-las_?”

“It is a lower-powered laser weapon, suitable for pest control or the ignition of previously-applied unlit promethium.”

I cocked my head and ignored Reese’s whisper of, _“Look, Blondie’s doing the puppy thing!”_

“Is it viable for point-defence? I’ve not had any grenades tossed my way just yet, but I don’t imagine it’s especially pleasant, as experiences go.” I took a sip of tea and thanked the God-Emperor for reasonable caffeination.

She got a few words into explaining that, yes, it was, before things stopped being nice.

What interrupted her was the sound of metal boots clanking up the stone stairway.

My body froze, and my head- my eyes- they wouldn’t turn away from the doorway. If I turned my head, my eyes stayed on the door. I could look up and down a bit, but some force had locked my view to the doorway.

The footfalls grew louder. Nearer.

At the periphery of my vision, I saw Reese stand and draw her laspistol, but the techpriestess was frozen, too. Only, she was stuck staring at me, eyes wide with mounting terror.

I started to speak, only to realize I hadn’t learned her name.

“I- Enginseer?”

“Fiolina.” She answered, and chittered something in the Binary Cant of the Adeptus Mechanicus. “Sister Reese and my servitor are mobile.”

_Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang._

Only, there was a scraping to it. The sound of a ceramite boot being dragged across the rockcrete steps.

I didn’t have time to make deductions before a form clad in Sororitas Light Power Armor limped into Eighth Squad’s refuge. Her limbs weren’t quite oriented correctly, and there was a substantial piece of shuttle-hull protruding through her breast.

I looked on in horror as her eyes settled on me, and, with a tired sigh that sagged her shoulders and made red run down her front, Palatine Croix smiled wearily and said, “You know, I think I’m quite dead, but- it seems I haven’t quite got the memo as yet.”

“Emperor on Earth,” I breathed, keenly-aware of the panicked edge creeping into my voice, and Sister Reese _screamed_.

At once, the gun servitor and the screaming Hospitaler opened fire on the woman who may well have saved my life.

The laspistol struck her first- light’s rather quick, after all -and Croix’s body was punched through like a cloud of smoke. Immediately, her form lost coherence and just… dissipated. Turned into smoke.

I cried, Reese put more las-bolts into the wall, and the gun servitor’s hail of bullets tore gouges in the wall and near-deafened us all.

Heavy Stubbers fired in a rockcrete room are, as it turns out, really frakking loud.

Once we were able to move our heads, Eighth Squad and its auxilia sprung into action.

The Guardsmen took up defensive positions as Sarge barked out orders, and Reese calmed down as I grabbed her from behind and pulled her into an awkward sort of one-armed embrace – like a hug, except she was facing the wrong way and my left hand was locked into position across my chest, so we had one arm, rather than four, involved in the maneuver. A later interview would reveal she had thought this was an attempt to soothe her. The idea was sweet and all, but the truth was that seeing the ghost of one of my superiors – one who had very probably died protecting me, embracing me – had very much rattled me, and I wanted a teddy bear.

A funny thing about powered armor is that, when you’re wearing it, your definition of ‘teddy bear’ expands to include ‘anyone not in powered armor’.

For a few minutes, nothing happened, and the optimistic among us began to think that everything had gone right. The two-man team manning the squad’s heavy bolter – a large woman and a slightly-larger enby, whose uniform was neither a man’s uniform nor a woman’s, but some odd amalgam of pieces of either that had been sewn together by either an actual tailor or a very talented quartermaster – began hypothesizing that her soul had been ‘laid to rest,’ whereupon Croix aurally, but not physically, manifested behind me.

“I appreciate the effort, _Sister Cassandra_ _,_ but I don’t think I’m going to be getting off the hook so easily. Ghosts don’t seem to die very well.” She laughed then, and Reese wriggled free of my grip, turned around, and clung to me, burying her face in my shoulder, whereupon Croix laughed again. The sound echoed through the room- not due to volume, but in a supernatural, hollow sort of way. “And, Yvie- a Hopsitaler, really? You _dog_.”

Reese seemed to register that she had been addressed, and raised her face from my neck to spit in the direction of Croix’s voice, “It’s _Cassiopeia_ , _fiend_.”

The ghost of my Palatine seemed confused for a moment. “Then, Cassandra was-?”

“Family.” Muttered Reese.

“My condolences. But I must warn all of you- this place is tainted, more than you could know. Do not linger here.”

Judging by the looks on the faces of my peers, my face must have darkened as I thoughtfully nodded.

“Chaos is a slow, insidious poison. A corruption that persists, tainting a place and all within it...”

A chill raced up my spine as realization struck, and I turned to face the not-quite-present Croix.

“We have to purge your body,” I said, “let fire cleanse your soul.”

“The Archenemy is our reflection. A distortion of our best and worst qualities that the universe shows us- warns us with, and which we find wanting. It is not evil, but _potential_ , and it is in this that the danger lies. Love is not evil, after all, but-”

I had to admit- she almost had me for a second, there.

“Scout!” I called, remembering the underslung grenade launcher of his lascarbine. “What kinds of grenades are you carrying?”

“Frag, Krak, Smoke, and Incendiary.” He answered smoothly. The man jogged over without another word, and followed me to the window after I had passed Reese off to the nearest person, who happened to be Fio.

As it turned out, Fio looked like she _was_ pretty good at hugging.

Croix hissed something at me, and I mockingly repeated her heretical nonsense back to her, pausing to point to her mangled corpse. “Introduce her to our old friend Cindy, would you?”

The man nodded, selected and loaded a grenade, and, after taking careful aim, fired the weapon with a hollow report that, while nowhere near as exaggerated and ‘THONK’-like as the holoshows tended to make it, did still sound a bit silly. Something about the weights of different varieties of grenades altering barrel harmonics and gas pressures in a certain way- Fio gave numbers, later, but if you’re really curious, ask your own Enginseer or local techie, they’ll likely be ecstatic to find an interested ear for once.

Croix went from hissing things at me to simply _hissing_ at me, and then went silent as something vaguely akin to an extremely angry flare turned her corpse to vapor.

It also burned a fairly substantial crater into the ground.

Some people will tell you that the weakness of a meltagun lies in ‘dispersal issues’.

As a Sister of Battle, I can tell you that ‘dispersal issues’ is code for ‘makes very big holes in things you don’t like, but really can’t shoot especially far.’

I probably _don’t_ need to tell you that my Sisters, myself included, tend to adore the bloody things. For good reason, I would posit- burning bad, heretical, or otherwise unfriendly things has, near as I can tell, literally never failed us. Never have I seen an instance of them not working to satisfaction, or backfiring, or anything of the sort. They just make things very hot, and then those things die.

I just felt it was relevant, because the dispersion of that grenade’s superheated payload had been really helpful.

Turning to Sarge, I very helpfully suggested, “Sergeant, we need to move.”

The sizable non-com nodded stoically. “Any idea where to?”

My response was the very reasonable one of pointing in the exact opposite direction of Croix’s crater. “Is that North?”

“Smiles indicates that it is,” the Coggirl chirruped, _actually_ -helpfully, “and our allies seem to have consolidated several hours’ march to the North of this location.”

The word ‘march’ caught me a bit out-of-my-element. “When you say march-?”

“Drop Troops don’t have time to do any less than 140 paces a minute,” Sarge proudly replied, “and a few-dozen clicks of double-time never hurt any Elysian who hadn’t been shot!”

Our breakfasts were devoured in mere minutes, our equipment was gathered just as quickly, and strapping Sister Reese to my back was so easy it wouldn’t bear mentioning if it wasn’t so fun to tease her about.

Not fifteen minutes later we were marching double, alternating between Guard cadences led by Sarge and Sororitas war chants led by yours truly.

The war chants seemed to unnerve the men a bit, at least initially, but we started hearing the whine of multilasers at around the two-and-a-half hour mark, and they were all belting their parts with proper gusto a bit before that point. It was a quarter-hour after that, as we (carefully, so as not to silhouette ourselves against the sky) crested a hill, laid eyes on the besieged firebase.

The trenchwork surrounding its perimeter had been overwhelmed and taken by the enemy, and las- and autogun fire blossomed to and from the encampment on all sides. Sister Reese cut herself free of me when I, alongside Sarge and the two marksmen, went down on my stomach to get a read of the situation, and I paid it little mind until heard her tell Enginseer Fiolina to unlock my arm. Well- until I actually registered what she’d said, a few moments later.

I halfway rolled over to see what she was doing when she put a hand on the back of my neck. It was an odd thing, as someone used to wearing powered armor, to realize that someone’s hands, when wearing simple carapace, weren’t plated on the inside. Just- it was just reasonably-thick groxhide, so she could grip things, and manipulate surgical tools, and-

Emperor deliver me, her hand was _warm_. Warm like the radiance of the God-Emperor.

“You took these wounds for my sake, Sister.” Said the Hospitaler, “Now, I shall take them for you.”

There was the briefest flash of golden light, and a vague, lingering feeling of approval-- like someone I’d respected very much had grinned and said, ‘ _Attagirl_ ’ when informed of my rash and stupid exploits – and, realizing Reese had possibly done something stupid, I tried to roll over the rest of the way, only to have my maneuver arrested by a trio of mechadendrites plugged into the rear panel of my armor.

Belatedly, I realized the dull ache in my armpit and side were largely gone, and, craning my neck, I could see Reese.

A thin line of red, just welling up out of a cut in her cheek, caught my eye immediately. It wasn’t a gash, like the wound in my face was, but the sort of cut that doesn’t entirely get through the skin in places, leading to interruptions in that bloody line. Her respirator-mask was pulled down and hung below her chin,

The blood which began to darken the lavender robes beneath her arm was far more alarming than a scrape, and she opened her mouth to speak as my left arm was unlocked and the techpriestess let out a happy chirp.

“I’ve only gone halfsies-” was all she managed before I shut her up with my mouth.

Laying on hands, in my opinion, is and was kiss-worthy. Letting the Emperor’s kindness shine through her medical instruments, passively letting Him ply her soul for that extra ounce of mercy or luck, and even actively exhausting herself to channel His power and heal wounds so long as she can keep her focus – these are all feats we of the Sisterhood very much do not take for granted, and there is good reason why our Sisters Hospitaler are beloved by all. Their ministrations are aided by the divine, and it shows.

To lay on hands as an individual, though- it is to beseech the Emperor to allow you to sacrifice yourself for the sake of another. It is taxing spiritually as well as physically, and there are stories of Sisters who martyred themselves taking the wounds of others unto their own bodies. For Reese to take half of my wounds, while herself injured- I might have hit her, had I not been in power armor and had she not been extra-hurt.

Ramblings about how Reese was quite good aside, I guess that’s the difference between hitting someone and kissing them, in that sort of scenario- the details.

Besides, I was about to charge out into a fight involving a daemon of some kind, dozens of traitor guard, and two vandalized, spiky chimeras, and I didn’t know that I’d survive any one portion of that, let alone _all_ of it- regardless of how many usable limbs I had at the start of things.

And Emperor only knew what Smiles the servoskull was showing Fio with its pict-feed.

I remembered the guardsmen taking cover behind their rockcrete barricades and prefab walls, kissed the idiot another time – just for luck, of course – and pulled the rest of the duct tape she’d been lashed to me with off of my ceramite midsection as I called Tudor over to plug up the holes the Emperor had allowed her to put in herself on my behalf.

To be honest? I still complain about that in my prayers from time to time.

“I’m going to have a go at that daemon,” I told her. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do twice, understand?”

She offered a goofy sort of half-smile and blearily said, voice honey-sweet, “Have fun. Don’t get stabbed.”

And _then_ she nodded at my words, and Tudor and I realized in unison that extra-strength painkillers, in the Guard, are _actually extra-strength painkillers_ , and are formulated to work on a fairly-large man (like Sarge) while not literally killing a smallish woman (like Simmons, who, while fairly tall, probably weighed about as much as Reese). I’d later learn that they’re also formulated so two ampules is enough to work on an Ogryn, which is pretty neat.

The daemon in question, a Bloodletter, was currently wrestling a somewhat pissed-off-looking Ogryn in front of the camp’s gates, and, to be honest? The Ogryn may have been winning. Hard to tell, really, daemons are weird and a bit scary.

Preparations for our assault were… I don’t want to say ramshackle, but they were definitely a tad ad-hoc. The friendly position was somewhere between circular and hexagonal, and we had a view of- well, from the perspective of someone standing inside, facing the gate, it would’ve been the front, left quarter. The fight itself was static, with both sides well and truly stuck fast. Our allies had nowhere to retreat to, and the traitor guard had fought for every inch leading up to the trenchworks they’d seized: any attempt to fall back would see them cut down like grain on an agri-world.

With both forces holding their positions with all their might, little effective fire was being exchanged – either side was suppressing the enemy, and that was all they could really hope to do.

The camp within the breastworks that made up the Elysians’ perimeter was abuzz with noncombatants and support personnel. Children and any young adult not big enough to be put in armor and handed a lasgun were being corralled into the basement of a slightly-overcooked rockcrete patio that had probably been a building at one point. PDF troopers – soldiers of the Mina’s Stead Planetary Defense Force, the planet’s local military, were easily-spotted by their red, black, and gray flak armor as they moved to reinforce the squads of Elysians who held the lines. Most striking amongst the figures was a colossal woman, an Ogryn who must’ve stood three meters tall and who wore a white apron that was frankly pristine. She carried a humongous pot of some kind of stew in one arm and a great big spoon in the other hand, and casually walked, standing bolt-upright and proud, from position to position, seeing to it that every squad was fed.

A stray round from an autogun struck the jolly giant, and I swear at least three grenades were sent back, addressed, near as I could tell, _‘To whomever it was that shot our cook.’_

The Ogryn, for her part, didn’t seem overly-concerned by the gunshot wound. It hadn’t stained the front of her apron or got into the stew, and, by the Emperor, that was all she was concerned about.

Now, I want to tease those Guardsmen. You know that every bone in my body aches to do so. But, when I think of what sort of reprisals I might make, had someone shot my Canoness- a volley of frag grenades seems pretty fair. Hell, I’d used the powers inherent to being a reasonably-pretty teenaged girl to convince a member of the Adeptus Arbites that the things a Munitorum scribe had said to my mistress were cruel enough to warrant investigation, and all he’d done was insist that our Order had ‘Only suffered thirty-one percent fatalities in the Jericho Reach Campaign.’ Granted, she punched him so hard that she managed to bend one of his augmetic eyes, but, frankly, most of our casualties hadn’t been fatalities, and his outright denial of everything my mistress requisitioned was apparently the sort of thing Arbitrators tend to get really upset over.

You’d really be amazed at how much a large man wearing Arbitrator carapace armor and carrying an automatic shotgun, backed up by a dozen praetors, can get done in one day. He never even fired a shot.

The Canoness had made me wax every set of armor we had at the convent. She’d also made sure every woman knew that I was to thank for having secured all the medical supplies we’d needed. I received a lot of hugs from veteran Sisters who had been told that I was the reason they’d gotten their augmetic hand, leg, or eye.

That Ogryn kept those boys fed, just like the Canoness kept my Sisters and I alive and coherent. It’s my experience that soldiers will very much go out of their way to take care of those who take care of them, be that person an abhuman, a religious exemplar, or a caring Commissar.

But, I digress.

In terms of armor, the Elysian 36th had a few Drop-variant Sentinel Walkers, none of which seemed to be in fighting condition – one of them appeared to have been relieved of its legs by some kind of weapon that had cut clean through them; I tried not to think about how the Bloodletter’s humongous daemonic battle-axe seemed to be just about the right size...

Instead, I considered, albeit belatedly, that Reese’s hand had felt as though warmed by divine radiance for good reason.

I also worried that I shouldn’t have just kissed her like that. My foolish young mind didn’t know whether to be more worried about that or the literal Daemon, which I at least took as a good sign – it meant that my faith and my training were acting as a bulwark against the supernatural terror daemons are apt to instill, leaving me instead afraid in the more mundane sense of knowing that creature could tear me in half and probably eat my soul or something.

Sergeant Sevens, once he’d appraised the situation, wasted no time barking out orders. “Prettyboy, Dillons- form up on Solaris!” The two troopers saluted sharply with a pair of _‘Yes, sir!’_ s, and Sarge turned to me. “Yvie, I don’t care if you have to kill it or beat it at a game of frakking cards, just make the daemon _gone_.”

I snapped to a proper, _Sororitas_ salute, with my left hand behind my tailbone and my right clenched in a fist over my heart, knuckles outward.

“Ave Imperator!” I replied, and unslung my bolter.

As I affixed my bayonet, checked that my instrument of divine wrath was loaded, and, for the first time in my life, longed for combi-flamer for purely-practical reasons.

The Scout – ‘Prettyboy’, as I would forever address him thenceforth – had a lascarbine, an undermount grenade launcher to mirror the undermounted flamer my heart yearned for. The launcher was a good start, and full-auto lasfire would do _something_ , if not much. Dillons’ nicknames were primarily centered around the fact that he was a plasma gunner, Emperor bless him, and, while ‘Sunny’ was probably the most fitting, ‘Plasmalad’ was absolutely funnier. At some point, he ended up promoted to Corporal, and after that it was always ‘Cpl. Plasma (Hero of the Imperium!)’ on all the forms.

And, of course, _here_.

As weapon specialists go, the boys, girls, and nonbinary burn victims who specialize in the venerable Plasma Gun are a bit like the ones who train on Hot-Shot lasguns rather than, say, Hellguns or bolters. That is to say, dedicated and a bit mad.

You see, the Hot-Shot lasgun is effectively a regular lasgun, ruggedized another order of magnitude to account for frequent – near-exclusive – use of Hot-Shot power packs. They’re certainly potent, and I’d very much prefer not to be shot with one or five, but a Hellgun, with its dedicated backpack power-cell and variable power settings and fire rates, offers a more distinct and less risky benefit. A Hellgun power-cell can be recharged all the normal ways a lasgun power pack can, it’s just a great deal bigger; Hot-Shot power packs, in my experience, are easy enough to carry in regular Guard webgear, but their machine-spirits can be picky. One power pack might prefer to charge on the generator, while another will be displeased if not left to bask in the sun.

The plasma gun is similar in that it can be a finicky thing indeed- rewarding, surely, but best put into the hands of a soldier willing to well and truly specialize. Upset it, and it’ll vent superheated gases into your face. Or crotch. If it likes you, it’ll probably vent horizontally instead. Like a meltagun, a plasma gun uses the principle of ‘a very hot enemy/tank/building is a very dead one’ to make things incredibly unhappy with their lot in life. Unlike a meltagun, the plasma gun doesn’t necessitate closing to thirty meters for an effective shot, and a skilled user can do an impressive amount of damage with their weapons’ globules of superheated plasma without worrying about those silly ‘dispersal issues’ and such.

A plasma gun, I felt confident, could make a Bloodletter start to think that it’d really rather be somewhere else. It wasn’t a flamer loaded with blessed promethium, or a multi-melta, and I’m obligated, as a Sister Militant, to be upset by any given lack of flamers and meltaguns, but it shot clumps of star-stuff at the enemy, and- well, I could complain about the lack of flamers and meltas, but I see little reason for someone to complain about having a plasma weapon with a skilled user on-hand.

‘Sun gun’ is also, admittedly, a pretty cool name.

I’m talking technical stuff to cover up the fact that, in that moment, I had no plan beyond ‘run up and shoot the daemon a whole lot’. Well, that, and to help you understand the situation, but if I wanted to do that, I’d tell you that the two Chaos Chimeras appeared to be thoroughly mission- or mobility-killed, and the Guardsmen in their firebase couldn’t spare their attention to the horned devil being grappled by their Ogryn comrade.

Well, no- I just got swept up and neglected to elucidate those points, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with this whole… ‘my exploits’… _thing_. Bravery and heroism have nothing to do with it – the traitor Marine, Reese, and now the daemon… ‘Well, I wasn’t just going to stand there and let him pick me back up,’ ‘It was the right thing to do,’ and ‘I was the one with the power armor, the near-immunity to supernatural fear and daemonic corruption, the Godwyn-De’az, and the frakking orders to go and kick the abominable thing the hell off of our planet and back into the Warp’. Respectively, that is. I was making it all up as I went along, I was a rookie, and grenades had solved about half of my problems thus far. Including the ghost of my superior officer, just a few hours prior. In case you’d forgotten.

So, yes, I closed my eyes, clutched the adamantium beads of my Chaplet Ecclesiasticus, and prayed to the God-Emperor. I asked that He not judge me too harshly for flying by the seat of my shield robes, that He at least consider (if-stroke-when I died at the clawed hands of that daemon over there) that I hadn’t had any sort of fire or fire-like _anything_ , which I felt was a pretty significant blow to my ‘expertise’ in daemon-purging, given the tactics and methods I’d been taught had always involved flamers, flamers and meltas, or heavier versions of both. Then I asked, as the thought occurred: _“Improv isn’t the proper way to introduce someone to daemonhunting, right?”_ But He didn’t need to answer, because I wasn’t _stupid_ , and most people who encountered the damnable creatures were probably Guardsmen who just had one of the accursed things show up one day and had to shoot it until it died or pissed off.

I suggested to Him that it was kind of a dick move that somebody had decided secrecy was more important than issuing a pamphlet about this sort of thing. Obviously that wasn’t His fault, but who else was I going to complain to? Palatine Croix? That ship had sailed about two and a half hours ago.

By this point, I was already taking off down the hillside. I requested that He try not to think of this as a ‘Hold my amasec’ moment so much as a ‘Hold my Krak grenade’ sort of scenario, and told Him to watch over Reese and 8th Squad before He even _thought_ about worrying on my behalf ( _“Or so help me You, I’ll-!”_ ), before bellowing, aloud this time, “FOR THE EMPEROR!”

The rest of the squad opened fire as my run turned into a dead sprint, las-bolts and heavy bolter-shells screaming down the hill as I- well, as I _screamed down the hill_ in a more literal sense.

I learned the Commissar at the gates was Drookian when she shouted something at me that I vaguely understood to be a greeting of some sort, which involved terms and phrases like ‘OI’ and ‘YA POSH TWAT’-- to be honest, that was all I understood between the gunfire, the daemonic roars, and her accent.

There may have been a, “WHAT THE BLOODY HELL’RE YOU THINKIN’?”, too, but I was a bit preoccupied with the whole ‘big red daemon wrestling an Ogryn’ issue to worry much about what someone who, despite my sort-of attachment to a Guard unit as a field-adopted auxilary, such as it was, was not in any kind of charge of me. She was outside the Guard chain of command – above it, sort-of-technically, and I was in a kind of ‘opted-in’ position.

And if she wanted to summarily execute me or whatever it was she thought she’d do to put the fear of the God-Emperor into any member of the Adepta Sororitas, let alone my stubborn ass- well, I figured she could try. A Battle-Sister in powered armor is a bit more challenging a target than a traumatized Guardsmen, and, to paraphrase someone who was probably very wise, if she wanted to dispute the God-Emperor’s divine authority, she could argue with the barrel of a gun.

My healthy distrust of random angry Commissars aside – I had met enough Commissariat Cadets at the Schola to know that around a third of them were uptight and caustic enough to tan groxhide if you gave them the time of day – they’ve gotten much, much better since I was a girl. And I’ve gotten much better at appreciating the strategic value of Munitorum-issue hand grenades.

Something about our charge must have spooked the Ogryn, or perhaps Prettyboy or I had clipped the poor abhuman with a stray round, because, for just an instant, he stumbled. His attention wavered, and the daemon swept his legs out from under him and bodily _hurled_ him in our direction.

We scattered, and I realized only after throwing myself into the dirt that the monster had both broken our charge and very effectively freed himself from all entanglement.

The great bloody bastard – and bloody is absolutely a double-entendre in this case – cast his great horned head about, beady little eyes plainly searching for his weapon.

My hand found a rock the size of both my fists together as I scrambled upright, and I took the opportunity to throw it at the daemon. That got its attention, which, in hindsight, merely proved that I made questionable life choices, and it roared something that might have been words had it not had its jaw busted, presumably by the Ogryn he’d flung our way.

A plan began to coalesce in my mind, and I made a rude hand gesture at the daemonic berserker as I shouted to my comrades, “Slag its axe!”

A flash of greenish plasma-tracer out of the corner of my eye and the report of a grenade launcher off to my left were enough to make me feel fairly confident that Dillons and Prettyboy had got the idea, and I shouted to the rage-blinded daemon, offering a very risque account of things I _would_ have done to his mother, “-if she hadn’t been uglier than a Tau and twice as cowardly!”

I wasn’t suicidal enough to stand around and savor his reaction. Instead, I angled off to the left and ran like frak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, I've presumed the existence of guns beyond what's in ~the books~, because, while things like a varmint rifle might not be relevant to the big picture military stuff, the things are almost certainly ubiquitous in, say, hive cities and starships. And things like submachine-guns and light support weapons are the sorts of things that obviously exist, whether or not they're truly commonplace in the 41st. I mean, hell, DH and OW don't really have rules for full-auto lasguns, which are obviously a Thing. (They have stutter-lasguns and the Minerva-Aegis lascarbine, and the Triplex, but the standard ones aren't select-fire, whereas I'm pretty sure that's the sort of thing with rather a lot of variance in-setting.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things go ploin-shaped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "No plan ever survives initial contact."  
> -Murphy's Laws of Combat Ops

My plan was a simple one.

I’d let the big angry red boy be as big and angry as he wanted.

In his own trench-line.

I skirted close to the edge of the first trench, actually taking a few blue-on-blue hits from reflexive lasgun snap-shots, courtesy of the defending Elysians. Nothing that did more than score my armor, though, and certainly nothing that could stop me from dropping a frag grenade into the traitor’s trench as I blew past.

Now, in my foolishness, I had been a little concerned that the daemon might actually exert some self-control and stop short of potentially trampling his comrades. He had decided to prove me double-wrong by scooping one up and flinging the bastard at me.

Of course, the only warning I had to that fact was when a heretical trooper slammed into my back and sent me face-first into the dirt, knocking me senseless and giving the daemon time to close what little distance I’d been able to maintain and then tear me to shreds, or eat my legs, or whatever sick and twisted nonsense daemons do to Sororitas who say such inappropriate things about their mums.

The heretic tried to stab me, as we both scrabbled to right ourselves, of course. He was a gibbering madman with squiggly face tattoos that looked like he’d done them himself- in preschool, and, thank the Emperor, he tried to use a reverse-grip. A downward thrust of a beaten-up old combat knife, directly into my pauldron, where it promptly skittered off.

I fired from the hip, and, being within literal stabbing range of the man, hit him at about the same height with my first shot. Innards became outards as I let recoil drag the muzzle of my weapon ever higher, and I had a horribly close-up view of a man having hand-sized holes punched in series up the centerline of his body, where explosive shells turned viscera and bone into shrapnel that was not only grisly in effect, but in nature and origin. Whether that makes it three times as grisly as normal shrapnel or not, I’m honestly not sure.

Before his sort-of-bisected corpse hit the earth, I was on the move again.

I didn’t look back, but I could actually smell the brimstone, and the detonation of an airbursting krak grenade (it must have been, because I didn’t die horribly) a scant few meters behind me confirmed two things. The first was that the daemon was much too close to Sister-snatching range for my liking; the second was that the defenders, with some of the heat on them relieved (or perhaps just because they didn’t want to see me brutalized by a Bloodletter), were able to send some firepower my way.

Everything was going more or less as planned.

This was a red flag so colossal and so unnerving that even Mr. Bloodletter over there would have at least been given pause by the sheer size of the thing.

In any battle, the plan is always among the first casualties.

Fortunately – in a sense – I hadn’t needed to wait very long for the other shoe to drop. As it so happened, one of the busted traitor Chimeras retained limited use of its multilaser. It couldn’t be brought to bear on anything even approaching the vehicle’s forward arc, thanks to a good portion of its front hull being primarily warped and twisted metal that actually physically restricted the weapon’s traverse, and its powered traverse was mangled, too, leaving the weapon effectively fixed in a mount. The only travel it had was what aiming could be done manually.

Up ‘til that point, the gunner had been left in a target-free environment, devoid of Sororitas, depriving him the opportunity to, as some posh traitor officer had probably said to him, “Give ‘em loads, dear boy!” Judging by the helmet we found in the Chimera afterward, anyways.

In any case, that’s when I rounded the somewhat corner-like _bend_.

All I saw was a Chimera peeping right at me, and then the strobe of las-tracers as the rising whine of a multilaser filled my ears with news that the plan had turned up dead after all.

The burst of las-bolts took me center-of-mass, and put my ass in the grass, both so-to-speak and literally, as this side of the annoyingly-indecisive-in-shape FoB actually had a bit of a lawn.

At the same time, the Chimera, overtaxed by an overeager idiot’s salvo in addition to extensive battle-damage, exploded. Not a lot, mind, but a little. It was some jargon or another, not enough to destroy the vehicle any more than it was, but the thing didn’t continue firing and kill me outright, and I did NOT look that gift-horse in the mouth. Especially considering it added in the free bonus gift of placing me flat on my back at the feet of a daemon who seemed about as taken aback as I was as it stopped and looked down at me.

I noted the multiple chest-wounds I’d taken with the distant sort of interest of a woman sharing a moment of keen understanding with a daemonic berserker.

I looked into his eyes as he looked into mine, and we both understood that neither of us had expected that, nor did we particularly know how to react to it.

With his beady little eyes, he wordlessly suggested that we could try and kill the everloving hell out of one another, and I, with my eyes, agreed that he probably had the right idea.

Fortunately, I had a bolter and he didn’t.

With a lot more difficulty than most of you who haven’t been touched by angels and kissed by a burst from a multilaser can appreciate, I raised my boltgun and dumped the rest of my magazine into his face on full-auto.

It turns out 27 bolt-shells at point blank range are enough to deal with a lesser daemon.

It also turns out that when a newly-headless daemon falls onto you, pinning your arms and weapon to your shiny new chest wounds, you can’t really contribute much to the more mundane bits of a firefight. Or see.

Or wonder if shit like this was why so many veterans, Battle-Sister and Guardsman alike, drank recaf.

(A few minutes later, the last few shells I’d fired, which hadn’t actually touched the daemon, being that there wasn’t any head left to hit, came back down and scared the living daylights out of Sunny and Prettyboy, who were trying to figure out how to get a big sod-off daemon off of someone without using things that might maim or kill the someone in question. As a wise man once _(_ _-ish_ _)_ said, _“Gravity sucks!”_ )

I eventually found whoever launched that airburst grenade and thanked them for not using frag, by the way. Though the realization it had been a happy accident – or, rather, the realization of what that meant after she dismissed it as having simply been the one she’d grabbed – had been pretty profound, if remarkably straightforward in its profundity. After that, her squad, then her platoon, then second company as a whole, and finally the entire 36th Elysian, started being rather more keenly-aware of what grenades they were sending where.  


## * * *

Turns out the ‘Sororitas auxiliaries’ were already well-liked by the time I woke up in the field hospital.

I told a few troopers it wasn’t fair if they didn’t give me a chance to disappoint them, and apparently they had an appreciation for my sense of humor, because then it was, “Yvie, why’d you become a crazy zealot with a bolter instead of joining the Guard?”

To which I replied, “You jackasses are the ones who jump out of perfectly good Valkyries, and what part of ‘with a bolter’ isn’t clear to you?”

Of course, my banter with assorted lasgun-toting Drop Troopers came _after_.

What I woke up to was Reese and the Commissar with the oversized power sword carefully extricating me from my armor while Fio and Smiles the servo-skull collected the bits and arranged them neatly on an adorable little table from some sort of outdoor children’s playset. A matching helmet, shiny and generally pristine, sat with the other plates and sub-assemblies, and the Ogryn cook I’d seen earlier, whose apron bore a name-tag that identified her as ‘MAMA’, was not only was the first to notice I was awake, but had also followed my gaze.

“We ended up with a few crates’a y’all’s wargear after your… _landin’_.”

I nodded dumbly, unable to summon the energy to ask after any potential flamers or meltaguns, and, perhaps more alarmingly – I expect it depends on who you ask, really – unable to muster any sort of wise-ass remark about Reese being in such a rush to get at my codpiece that she’d brought a friend, or something of that nature.

I just ate gratefully as Mama literally spoon-fed me some of that stew she’d been carrying about. She wasn’t a Sister Famulous by any means, but it was pretty damn good. The sorta thing that warms you to your core.

“Eat up now, darlin’,” she soothed, probably reckoning it was better to err on the side of caution than to inadvertently aggravate some kind of daemon-induced trauma. “Daemon-slayin’s hungry work, I expect, an’ if you’re gonna keep gettin’ shot like this, I want you eatin’ well, y’hear? Eat somethin’ that sticks to your ribs, an’ hopefully that’ll make’em less liable to break.”

Reese chimed in, her voice light and sweet and free of any trace of her earlier painkiller-induced fogginess, “Don’t worry about Yvie too much. According to her records, she’s had a truly unnerving number of broken bones and the like. Each time they heal, they do so a bit stronger than they were before.”

The Hospitaler returned to being very interested in stripping me down, and Mama whistled appreciatively. “Fascinatin’ stuff. Truly, the Emperor _does_ protect.”

“You seem very well-spoken, Mama,” I said at length. When she chuckled, my groggy brain registered that my compliment had definitely sounded like the sort of thing that ends with, ‘for a filthy abhuman’ or ‘for an Ogryn’, rather than, _‘I had regular lessons in both High and Low Gothic throughout the entirety of my tutelage at the Schola, and now I feel a bit bad for teasing a cute tutor or three’._

Before I could apologize, correct myself, or ask Reese for help, Mama replied.

“I’m also about as proof against bullets as you are, Lil’ Miss Tin Soldier, and a damn fine cook if I may say so myself.” She accentuated this point by feeding me another spoonful of her stew. With a shake of her head and a soft, bemused snort, she added, “Now, don’t you go worryin’ about offendin’ me none. You got pinned under a daemon after you got done killin’ it, an’ you’ve got a brassiere that’s more holes than cloth. A little faux-pas should not concern you more than the extraneous holes in ya, or the nurse who keeps shootin’ looks your way like you’re apt to up an’ keel over.”

Reese gave a combination pout and harrumph which prompted a deep belly-laugh from Mama, and caused the fiery-haired Commissar to grumble something about ‘Feckin’, and something I didn’t quite catch, but thought was probably either a colloquialism for lesbians or some sort of off-color euphemism for a certain type of upper-class woman. I decided that bringing up the Hospitaler’s obvious Cadian heritage wouldn’t help anything at all,except maybe get me teased about sticking up for a ‘girlfriend’.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind that sort of teasing- I didn’t, however, intend to get poor Sister Reese involved in that sort of thing unless I understood her situation better. For all I knew, she could have been straight, or ace, or gayer than a sack of rainbows but not looking for a relationship with an arguably injury-prone Sister Militant, or maybe even just uncomfortable being open about what she might consider private matters, or uncomfortable being the subject of the deaded couple-gossip. It was even possible that the idea of being perceived as a little girl playing at war was one she found eminently distasteful, and wished to thoroughly avoid.

Sure, she’d flirted with me and so on, but some people just find flirting fun, or do it without thinking or even realizing. I flirted with and even shared a bunk with an ace girl for… a couple of months at least, I suppose? However long that unexpected stint of ‘severe winter weather’ lasted.

I ought to clarify that, because Janess was both asexual _and_ an ace pilot by the turn of the Millennium, which, to her mostly-feigned chagrin, made her an ace ace. I don’t remember exactly when she became an ace, but it was definitely within a year of my ‘Guard Service’ on Mina’s Stead. Or Minastead- I’ve seen it spelled both ways, and at least a few others.

“Yvie was so consistently… _Yvie_ that the Canoness herself took to personally looking after her! How could I not worry, especially when she ate a burst from a multilaser and had a frakking Bloodletter fall on her afterward?”

“I- I thought she did that because she liked me,” I admitted, weakly and mostly to myself.

The Hospitaler’s features softened as she shifted worry-gears from ‘This idiot’s gong to die if I don’t do something,’ to the much scarier, ‘This idiot’s going to cry if I don’t do something.’

“Hey, hey-” she cooed, “if she didn’t care about you, she wouldn’t have bothered. You showed promise, but-”

I snorted derisively, and the Commissar looked up at me and, in perfect, melodious, unaccented High Gothic, said, “Berate yourself all you want, Sister Solaris, but you’ve personally slain a daemon and a Traitor Astartes within the first days of your first deployment. Don’t insult the Canoness for being right.”

“And she makes it clear in multiple places on your record that you’re like a daughter to her.”

“… That makes the crush I had on her kinda weird, huh?”

Reese rolled those purple eyes of hers. “Is it really any weirder than our fellow Sisters, _Daughters of the Emperor_ , having crushes on Him on Terra?”

I had to concede on that. “At least being a teenager is embarrassing for everyone, I suppose?”

The medic grinned, and, thankfully, didn’t stoop to bringing up my being nineteen (and thus technically a teenager). Instead, she waved a hand dismissively and said, “Oh, you would _not_ believe how many posters of Saint Katherine I had.”

“Why wouldn’t I? Saint Kathy was a _babe_.” I accepted another spoonful of stew, chewed a bit of meat thoughtfully, and swallowed like a proper lady. Then, to counteract that, said, “Saint Dominica’s Shield-Bearer didn’t need to carry a bolter, with guns like those.”

Bad as that joke was, we all had a giggle over it anyways.

“It’s funny you say that, Sister-” the Commissar began, and I squealed as her cold hand settled on my partially-bare midsection. She pulled away and got halfway through apologizing for touching me like that when she paused, went red in the face, and sighed, “Right- augmetic fingers’re cold.”

Mama reached down and patted the woman’s head. “Pia means well,” said the Ogryn, who seemed unconcerned as Commissar Pia’s face turned a shade pinker, “she jus’ has some fire in ‘er, is all.”

Still, she asked this time, a quiet, “May I?”

I hummed my assent, and, when I noticed Reese Not-Looking, stuck out my tongue and winked at her, delighting in her much more dynamic expressions of embarrassment.

“You’re toned enough to tell you don’t skip physical training, but not especially muscular.”

“She’s lean, like a Guardsman.” Mama commented, and I swore there was a hint of disappointment, perhaps disapproval, in her voice. All thins- er, I swear that was an honest typo, just an amusingly-relevant one.

All things considered, I took that to mean she thought I was too skinny.

“It makes my job easier,” Reese stated simply, and a bit _too_ neutrally, with a half-hearted shrug.

Fio chirped something about my B.M.I. being within perfectly acceptable parameters, and Pia looked up at me with what I took to be genuine curiosity. And genuinely-cute freckles.

“Are you a runner?” She asked.

“Don’t ask any of the Guardsmen that,” I reflexively quipped, and the flash of guilt that momentarily darkened the Commissar’s features caught me off-guard enough to delay my actual consideration of the question.

Mama solved the problem with a spoonful of stew for the Commissar this time.

“A- yeah, a bit, I suppose.” I answered. “Agility and endurance are more important than strength training, in my book. Although- Reese, would you remind me to try and get my hands on a chainsword?” I looked the Hospitaler up and down, noted that she looked like she was a smidge disappointed at something, and considered things more personal than ‘Reese’ and less cumbersome than ‘Cassiopeia’ to call her by. “And we could both use a change of robes, huh?”

The oxidized blood staining the gold-trimmed lavender fabric that draped under her arm was fairly upsetting to look at, in all honesty, especially considering it had come from a wound of mine, earned through no fault of hers. She had taken that wound for me, and I’d repaid her by kissing her, then going and getting my tits shot off by a dozen or two las-bolts.

All of us lapsed into quiet as the pair finished extracting me from my armor, and Mama, like a true sage, picked up on the energy building in that tent and practically dragged Pia out by the ear as Reese helped me seat myself on a hospital cot. After a few minutes of silent treatment – as in, medical treatment – the Enginseer cheerfully chimed in that tinny, but kind-of adorable voice of hers, “Access to replacement parts and associated materials will expedite repairs significantly.”

“Thanks, Fio. Goodnight- and get some rest, will you?”

“Perhaps,” buzzed the red-robbed techpriestess, and distributed certain portions of my armor between her servitor and herself. “Enjoy your sexual relations and/or argument.”

And then she left, turning out the lights as she went, immersing us in darkness.

Reese sat down beside me, and I began to compose my apology. First, I’d just plain apologize. Then I’d apologize for kissing her, and then for kissing her before running into a multilaser. After that I could apologize for continuously doing stupid things.

Even as I opened my mouth to speak, Sister Reese preempted me with a simple question. “Yvie, did you kiss me?”

I flinched away, and she put a hand on my shoulder. “…Yvie?”

The concern in her voice was something I didn’t know how to feel about.

“I did.” I answered solemnly, and-

The Hospitaler let out a sigh of clear relief. “Thank the Emperor. Nobody’d said a word about it, and I was starting to worry I’d had a bad reaction to Guard-issue painkillers or something.”

This left me a bit torn. Part of me felt this was just another stroke of luck, so to speak, and I had still done wrong by letting myself get swept up in things rather than asking, or refraining entirely.

The other corner contended that I was letting stress, anxiety, blood loss, whatever medications I might have been on, and my own insecurities prey on- well, on me. Well, ‘letting’ is a bit of a strong word, and it was more an issue of circumstances compounding upon one another, but I was having a pretty hectic week, and I think I deserve to be cut a little slack in the ‘quality of introspective turns-of-phrase and elucidation’ department this time.

“I didn’t make you uncomfortable? I kissed you without asking-”

“Pff- _what_?” Snorted Reese. “I’ve slept with my head in your lap, been inside your thoracic cavity two more times than strictly necessary or expected of me. Throne, I laid hands on you so you could go fight a Bloodletter without asking what you thought about it, didn’t I?”

I blinked at her in the darkness. “No, you laid hands on me so I didn’t have to fight a daemon with one hand locked to my chest.”

“You-”

“I can’t just ignore daemons attacking our comrades because some guy stabbed me.” I argued, and managed to make Reese angrier, I think.

“Help me find your face so I can _slap_ you.”

After a few moments of coping with using sound to navigate my hands about, I found one of Reese’s and brought it to my cheek.

“… Yvie, don’t help me hit you just because I asked. It makes me feel ever worse than I did after threatening you in the first place.”

I pouted and said, “I do what I want.”

The Hospitaler traced my jawbone up to where she could lace her fingers through my hair. “You make me uncomfortable when you’re not around.” She pulled me closer to herself, and dropped her voice. “These past few days, while you’ve been out? I’ve slept here, near you. Tonight? I’m not with 8th  Squad, Yvie. I’m _here_. And making a mental note that your current dosage is a bit high.”

“I realize you’re the doctor, here, but- are you sure that’s healthy?” I paused. “The sleeping thing, I mean.

“I don’t _have_ to, I _want_ to.”

It probably goes without saying that my heart was racing by this point. We were nose-to-nose, I was a bit out of sorts, and my breast was wrapped in bandage from collarbone to around my lower ribs, and, oddly enough, my breast _s_ didn’t feel especially smooshed or constrained. How she’d managed that, I had no idea, but I feared her power.

She kissed me as I was marveling at my ability to breathe and the lack of pain unrelated to multilasers in my upper torso in general.

Admittedly, I squeaked a little in surprise, but Reese was plenty gentle, and pulled away after a few moments. “Stop calling me Reese,” she said breathily, and I nodded in place, my forehead pressed to hers.

“Fair enough. I was thinking about ‘Cree’-”

Another kiss, warm and damp and… _secure_ , in an odd sort of way. When we parted, she gently bit down on my bottom lip, dragging her teeth along and sending shivers up and down my spine, then up again for good measure. The sensation was bizarre and new and I figured I liked it quite a lot, and also that it was probably dangerous to do too much more of _that_ while my chest was one giant wound.

“And don’t ask permission to kiss me, okay?”

I demonstrated my mastery of this concept by wordlessly giving the Hospitaler a quick peck on the lips.

She snickered at that, and we lingered, resting our foreheads against one another again. “I should apologize, Yvie. I didn’t mean for things to get so… _stimulating_.”

That one made my face heat up. “Don’t say ‘stimulating’ like that, goof. I don’t like the implications of it.”

Of course, all my request accomplished was getting her to whisper, “Is the way I say ‘stimulating’ too... _stimulating_ for you, Yvie?”

“Yes,” I answered, flatly as I could, and pulled on her ear until she ceased her foolish resistance. “So. Hospitaler-formerly-known-as-Reese.”

The medic sighed, my incredibly-subtle lead-in having made her aware of what exactly I wanted to know, and admitted, “My middle name is Leona.”

“Oh, hey- that’ll actually work.” I didn’t even hide the fact that I was somewhat pleasantly-surprised. I especially didn’t hide the fact that it was obvious, to me at least, that she hadn’t proffered it before because she knew I’d just end up calling her ‘Leo’.

“Thanks, Leo,” I snickered, and savored her melodramatic groan of _‘Emperor, deliver me!’_ that my simple thanks had inexplicably generated.

The Hospitaller traced her fingers down my neck and arm, which turned out to be a fairly pleasant sort of sensation- gesture(?) and placed a kiss on the palm of my hand.

“Anything else before I tuck you in, strap you down so you can’t roll onto your wounds, sedate you, and fall asleep while formulating the proper dose of analgesics for you?”

“I- yeah.” I cleared my throat. “I hate to ask, but- how bad’s the whole… _multilas_ _er_ _love-tap_ looking?”

“Really gross- _ow_!”

I grimaced into the dark and let the giggling allay any concerns I might've had about having pinched her too hard.

“Leona, please.”

That was all I had to say to bring out the Medic Voice, as it happened.

“You’ll heal nicely, so long as you rest and recuperate. At the moment, your chest is pretty well scabbed-over. With the proper medicine and prayer, you could be good to go within the week. Although, as I’m sure you can imagine, there’s no way to avoid fairly extensive scarring.”

“Are we at least talking cool scarring?”

“I’d say so, yes,”she replied, still in full Medic Voice, “they’ll probably be pretty dope.”

“But not quite as impressive as they might be if I didn’t need to flash people to show them off,” I muttered, as if I didn’t have two outfits: shield robes, and shield robes under powered armor.

Leona didn’t say anything suggestive at that, which I found noteworthy.

“So- what happens if everything starts exploding before my skin’s finished figuring out how to be skin again?”

“Then I’ll apply synthskin over the wounds, bandage it all, and shove you into your armor, and we can sort it all out when things stop exploding.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mama is an Ogryn southern belle noblewoman, I think. Planetary noble? However 40k minor nobility works.
> 
> Alternative Summary: 'Sister Yvie learns that kicking some ass puts one's own ass in jeopardy.'


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Yvie is a bit problematic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K-kept ya waiting, h-huh?
> 
> I had this and the next chapter written, but depression and my idjit brain acted up, so- this is the first you're hearing of it.  
> I don't know how much more of this I'll be writing in the soon-times, but I'll end up on another 40k kick quickly enough, and then I'll likely be back here. Until then, I apologize for the delay, and hope that this offering of gay idiot pleases thee

Now, I know this will shock you – it shocked all of us – but we didn’t just get a week of peace and quiet. We got nine days.

Leona had cleared me to ‘go and do whatever you want, I guess’ on the morning of the eighth day, and, in hindsight, the fact that I promptly went to find out what 8th Squad was up to could probably be worked into some sort of joke, but it could probably also be interpreted as an omen from the God-Emperor Himself, which, to be honest?  
I feel like if He went out of His way to send an omen specifically to me, He’d make it something I would notice _then._

That silliness aside, Sarge reckoned that I had about a solid week’s worth of P.T. to catch up on, and that- that, I could do.

The rest of the squad – and, to my pleasant surprise, a fair portion of those PDF troopers – took turns running laps around Firebase Circtagon, leading us all in cadences of theirs, gossiping, or just plain complaining about, you know, ‘war and stuff’.

( _‘When My Grandma was Ninety-One’_ was my favorite, I think.)

There had, of course, been gossip about me. Of course, I discouraged all of this by contributing heavily, as a good Daughter of the Emperor ought to.

Don’t tell me the God-Emperor doesn’t love idle gossip, you _know_ He loves that as much as any of us.

One of the PDF troopers, a boy who couldn’t have been over seventeen, rolled up his sleeve and showed off the bit patch of synth-skin on his arm, where a las-bolt had halfway-grazed him. It was a bit lighter than his actual skin, but close enough that he asked if perhaps it tried to match somehow.

Naturally, I laughed at the notion. Not because it wasn’t a reasonable thing to think, but because, at the Schola Progenium on Ascalon, then the Convent Prioris on Ophelia VII, and finally at home – _our_ convent, at Saint Katherine’s Star – I had seen a lot of my Sisters with patches of synth-skin after… I mean, it’s common sense that teenaged girls, like anyone handed a Flamer for the first time, tend to end up with burns and such. And we Battle-Sisters are all about flamers, as I’ve established, and as is established in our first Maxim: _‘Faith and Fire’_.

The truly remarkable thing about synth-skin, in my experience, is the way that, no matter how light, dark, or in-between a Sister’s skin may be, synth-skin always sticks out like a sore thumb. Even people whose skin tone matches it ends up with an obvious blotch of synth-skin. Augmetics, however, never seem to have that problem.

Perhaps, then, I posited, synth-skin was made that way so it would be obvious to any given medicae that, hey, there’s a healing wound under that 15cm pink splotch.

He seemed very impressed with the guess I pulled out of my ass, which was nifty.

I certainly didn’t gossip about Commissar Pia, who touched my stomach and didn’t find a six-pack and seemed vaguely disappointed, or how she asked if I was ‘a runner’.

Did I receive advice on nurse-kissing in trade?

Well, friend reader, you’re most likely not in the Inquisition or a direct superior of mine, and psykers tend to be very well-behaved and polite around me for _some_ strange reason, so I won’t confirm that I absolutely, positively, suuuper did.

Simmons laughed at me for being a bottom.

Sunny suggested that I had topped that traitor Chimera so hard that it had exploded after shooting me, and I posited that Simmons would be cuter if she owned the fact that she was flat-chested.

She got pretty upset at that, actually, and told me to see how easy it was to transition and put on weight on long-range patrol rations. LRP rations, for those who may not be familiar, are a sort of specialist’s 24hr ration. They’re lightweight and reduced-calorie, and tend to have components that can either be taken as a number of small meals throughout the day, or as one meal that comes out slightly bigger than a normal lunch-- assuming lunch is your largest meal of the day.

(It was one of those, “Oh? Well let’s see how well _you_ fatten up in the Guard, then!" things.)

I honestly felt pretty bad after that, and may or may not have told Mama that a certain sharpshooter was trying to put on some ‘girly fat’, so to speak. I’m not even going to deny that, from then forward, I just gave Simmons whatever portion of my sweets rations I couldn’t even begin to consider actually-eating.

As if that wasn’t enough out of me, though, I teased her- and I mean the sort of teasing you do when saying something to a friend that’s just a bit too embarrassing for you to just _say_ , because reassuring a relatively-new friend who quite openly fancies you that she’s actually rather good-looking indeed is… well, it was a hair too embarrassing for me at the time.

So I, endeavoring to lighten the mood, told her she was _at least_ as pretty as Sunny, who, mercifully, wasn’t around to hear that. Or, had moved out of earshot, I should say.

Simmons grabbed me by the ear and led me behind the ‘fresher units, where she asked, “Have you never met a trans man before or what?”

I realized a few things, then.

Firstly, that assigning a few people on hormones to the same squad would ease logistics as well as allow that squad’s medic to learn the peculiarities of that through experience and a bit of study, rather than making several different medics have to pick up the niche and not especially combat-useful expertise.

Secondly, that, no, I actually hadn’t. _Sisters_ of Battle and all that. A trans boy wasn’t really eligible to be in the Sisterhood, and they presumably went down different paths at the Schola.

Well- I had very probably met a few transgender men in my life, but I hadn’t known any well enough for that sort of thing to come up. At the Schola, all the Progena were… evaluated? That’s not really the right word, but we had checkups at least every few months, and gender and sexuality were very definitely touched on. Apparently a decent proportion of ‘girls’ who show no interest in the Sororitas turn out not to be girls at all, and it’s investigated as a possible reason for that sort of disinterest. It turns out your schoolchildren’s morale will suffer if they think something’s weird or wrong with themselves – and I’m sure a lot of you can relate to that, as I personally can – so getting all that sorted early is vital. Starting the trans children on their hormone therapies, introducing us all to Magos Humperding, who was and is very thoroughly agender, and so on.

So, no, I legitimately hadn’t ‘met’ any trans men, as far as I was aware – which is sometimes, but by no means always, what people mean when they ask if you’ve met a sort of person or not.

Sometimes, dear reader, the point is that you’ve almost certainly met a number of them, you simply didn’t notice.

Other times, behind the ‘freshers, the point is that, _“Are you doing this on purpose, or are you an idiot?!”_

I had trans and nonbinary Sisters, of course, but they were all _Sisters_. Sure, the prohibition is phrased, “men-under-arms”, but we’re not the ‘not-men of battle’, and there are a number of less-gendered paths to walk for progena out there. I’m dead-certain there are plenty of cases of such individuals out in the galaxy, but I didn’t personally know any, and I have to assume that a lot of people would get tired of being assumed to be a woman all the time. Again, though: everyone’s a little different, and the galaxy is a ridiculously big place. Even on a small planet of six billion people or so, there are quite a few ‘one in a million’ individuals. Just accept people as they are, as you meet them, and you’ll figure it out in no-time.

As a slightly-offbeat friend of mine once said, ‘You’re all horny weirdos in the photoreceptors of the Omnissiah.’

I wonder if the Machine God finds it funny how, no matter how disappointed I am with myself and my shortcomings, others always seem to see triumphs, to be proud or impressed or…

…

The most difficult questions to answer have nothing to do with daemons or traitors or xenos or traumatic injuries and losses. Those are simple matters, truths that, while painful, are… simple? Easy, or almost easy. The hard questions are the ones like, ‘How are you so confident?’

To think that this facade, pathetic as it is, is enough to convince the casual observer and the passer-by.

…

A number of wise people have said things like, ‘Fake it ‘til you make it.’ Some people take that to mean one should lie, deceive, or cheat. Those people fundamentally misunderstand. It means that everyone makes it up as they go along. Nobody has everything planned out- nobody who would spend their time reading the memoirs of someone like me, or talk to a person like you, who has interests and actually indulges in them from time to time – which is what you’re doing right now, even if you think it some form of study. That you would study this proves interest in and of itself, whether it be in proper study or in the story I’m telling you. It means that we all screw up, and we screw up time and time again, and that’s how we learn and grow. I may not be as confident as I- well, that depends on how you define confidence, but this is my memoir, not yours. So hush up, nerd. Back to what I was saying: even if you take my self-flagellation as the _real_ truth of the matter, which- obviously it isn’t. We tend to rather exaggerate things while kicking ourselves, or leave out the felids we rescued from trees that day, or how we were decent to a Munitorum clerk who didn’t prompt any punchings, or how we made someone we loved laugh and smile and be happy. But, even if you take what I say about myself at face value, eventually survival and victory being sheer dumb luck just…

If I thought it was all luck, I wouldn’t practice my marksmanship every day, or do PT, or be afraid, or try to come up with something when put n a bad situation. It should be obvious that neglecting these things on account of ‘luck’ would be absurd. And that you can only claim so many things were luck before people start thinking you’re humble-bragging, or don’t appreciate that you inspire them and are bringing people down by dismissing praise you have, by all appearances ( _at absolute minimum_ ) earned, or have undiagnosed depression and need to see a psych, or any number of things that just…

Don’t be ungrateful to _yourself_.

And don’t believe a for an Emperor-damned minute that, a good portion of the time, the confidence isn’t real. There are always moments, always flashes. There are also times where your hands steady, your aim is true, and you have the presence of mind to _pull the trigger_ or _use a grenade_.

There are moments where you save that medic, or get that bit of information to a person who can use it for good. There are days you brighten.

You’re allowed to be down on yourself sometimes. To doubt yourself in quiet moments, when there are no Guardsmen or Hospitalers or Ogryn team moms to so very rudely force you to cheer up. When people aren’t being inconsiderate and let you sit around and mope- it’s okay if you do so, or tend to do so. It’s okay to see the faces of the heretics you’ve killed, to wonder if maybe they wouldn’t have turned things around if they’d had another day or week or had only been _wounded._ They were Human, or formerly so, and it’s normal to think maybe they could’ve got better. If your Commissar can’t understand that, they’re the sort of scum I’d like to shoot myself. Though, if they’re that daft, then they’ve proven to be miracles on legs by not dying glorious deaths by las-bolt to the back, or mistakes in fire support requests, or because somebody messed up a grenade throw.

It’s a wonder that some people manage to convince themselves that the Emperor would wholeheartedly approve of them executing able-bodied soldiers over minor or fabricated offenses.

But, my sincere advice on that matter would be this: talk to your noncom. Nobody above the rank of Sergeant. No offense to officers out there, but Commissars don’t play poker with Sergeants.

The point is, if I’m allowed to tell you about ‘that daemon I killed when I was nineteen’ and then bellyache about how, actually, I really suck, honest,’ you’re allowed to doubt yourself no matter what amazing things you get up to, because I guarantee you Saint Celestine never grew wings and decided she was too busy being a bastion of the Emperor’s divine might because she never doubted herself.

In fact, if you’re as much of a shameless fangirl of hers as I am, you’ll recall she was a Sister _Repentia_ when she started being literally too holy to die.

Never doubting yourself gets you into the realm of Commissars who execute people for sneezing and get mowed down by their own troops, because they’re that bad for the morale they’re meant to bolster. Never doubting yourself gets your augmetic eye punched out of shape by a distraught Canoness. Never doubting yourself leads to apostasy, because who needs a second opinion when they never even think to doubt themselves in the first place?

Never doubting yourself makes you come across like an _Eldar_.

Never doubting yourself is going into combat without armor.

Never doubting yourself is never reflecting, reviewing, or improving.

Consider the perspectives of others, but not to the exclusion of your own, and vice versa.

What I’m really trying to say, here, is that Simmons pinned me between herself and the wall, and I kissed her.

And Reese still teases me about it.

It’s okay to wish you didn’t have to ‘fake it’ in the first place.

It’s not okay to charge out in the open like I do unless you’re wearing power armor, though. Because you’ll frakking die, and what good does that do any of us? I promise you it’s less than what those pamphlets would have you believe.

A Guardsman’s life – a soldier’s life – is to shoot the enemy, call artillery, carry boxes of junk for smart people (or assholes), and take and hold positions. It is not ‘to die.’

Corpses can’t call the Basilisk batteries, or smooch people, or support their own weight, or actually _defend_ a position. Note how I said ‘actually defend’ and not ‘hold’. I’m well-aware that you can creatively prop up the bodies of the dead to make your ramparts seem like they’re bristling with armed men. But they can’t shoot without interference from a techpriest. And, _**no**_ , officer, your regiment does _not_ have enough enginseers to turn all the casualties from that charge you ordered into servitors. Not even if you point a gun at the poor bastard. Not even if you just want ‘the good ones’, because then they have to interpret your insane ramblings, pick out the bodies of the soldiers your delusional ass thinks of as ‘good’ – unless you meant ‘most usable’, which is fair. Morbid, but fair. And then they have to do the actual conversion, which isn’t exactly an in-and-out procedure.

Also, _yes_ , turning my Sisters into servitors _IS_ Heresy, and I most certainly _WILL_ purge you for doing so. As is turning the wounded into servitors. Or children. Or innocent civilians. Or petty criminals.

No, I’m _not_ over that yet.

Right, let me shift topic back to what I’m supposed to be recounting, here.

Based on the reasoning that it had been my idea to try and destroy the evil daemon axe, and that had been a good idea, and I was about the closest thing to a specialist on the subject available this side of His Most Holy Inquisition, I was placed in charge of making sure accursed thing _stayed_ destroyed.

‘Captain’s orders,’ apparently.

I don’t mean to skip ahead, mind you, but it wasn’t something I was informed about beforehand. It feels like here is the sort of… appropriate abruptness for it, if that makes sense? And by the time we get to it, maybe you’ll have that same sort of, _‘What? Oh, right, okay.’_ experience? Maybe.

After the serious topics were settled, conversation with the red-haired markswoman moved on to the _important_ ones, like, “Are the scars really that bad?”

It was a fair question – I was, rather unusually, not wearing armored robes. Instead, I had dressed in a pair of trousers (the pair from the set of robes that had been introduced to the wrong end of that multilaser, which were fine after being washed a few times) and a simple, sleeveless undershirt.

“I don’t know about bad, per se, but… they’re a _lot_.” I glanced down at the fabric covering my chest and grimaced. “The whole region’s a bit tender, but, here- help me unhook my bra and you can just look at it. Them?”

Simmons complied, but frowned as she began fiddling with the most complicated part of the process of donning power armor. “You kissed me not fifteen minutes ago, you can’t just ask me to unclasp you after that.” She complained. “Hey, Simmons, sorry I’m a gay idiot, wanna see my boob scars?”

I snorted at this, of course, and, flatly inquired, “Would it make you feel better if I covered my breasts, Simmons?”

The sharpshooter sighed. “There’s no correct answer to that, Yvie.”

“I know, isn’t it perfect?” Grinning, I leaned closer to the lanky woman, close enough to whisper, “Answer the damn question, Trooper.”

“I’d very much prefer you didn’t,” she admitted with a groan. “Throne, is this the fuckin’ dichotomy of man? You rescue a nurse, shoot a daemon, and bully a poor, innocent guardsman behind the ‘freshers?”

“Innocence proves nothing,” I whispered in my best scary cleric voice, and stifled a proper cackle when she rolled big, brown eyes at me.

“How come you’re like this now, but- _holy shit!?_ ”

The horrified expression didn’t bode well, and I wondered if my previous dainty glancing had been foolish- and looked down to see that it had.

Patches of red and pink, not too irritated anymore, but still clearly not done healing, bordered it all, marking streaks where bits of ceramite from my armor had turned to shrapnel and spalling and cut paths through my flesh. The main body of the scarring, which had discolored my skin to various shades of brown, in rings and skinny crescents and broken up by patches and slivers of my regular, fair skin tone. Well- my regular skin tone when sunburned or the like. Pink and irritated, but not darker or lighter than the rest of me.

The more I looked, the more I saw and made sense of.

You could actually pick out individual hits from the multilaser. See how much armor they’d penetrated, how much material – ceramite, superheated and vaporized – had been put into my body instead of launched outward as ejecta. Each subsequent hit scored had scored my armor and flesh a little deeper than its forebears, and the size and density of the formations of tiny pink puncture-wounds grew in response.

“And this is- I mean, you healed in a week.”

I looked up at the sharpshooter and didn’t look back down for a good while. “Right- scarring gets worse the longer things take to heal… right?”

Simmons gently probed at a what had probably been a fairly deep cut that ran up and parallel to my clavicle, deliberately not-touching anything that looked too irritated. Her brow furrowed in thought, and she offered, “Maybe that’s only a rule of thumb, and healing this much that quickly… y’know, negates that, or something?”

“Hospitalers _are_ a cut above,” I supposed, “it makes sense to me that forcing things to heal more quickly could put moons on my chest, where if I had healed from a normal week’s worth of being shot to hell with a lasgun, I might’ve just had nice, pale scars?”

“We _could_ just ask Reese.”

“Or,” I counter-proposed, “I could go find a nice, cozy foxhole somewhere, lay down, and cry in it.”

“Or,” argued Simmons, “we could ask your doctor girlfriend.”

“Or,” I insisted, “I could go pray in a hole in the ground.”

“Listen- if it doesn’t heal more… smoothly? By the time all this is over, I’m sure Sister Reese will cut out all the...” She gestured towards the portions of my skin that were… wrinkled? Like crumpled plastic sheeting, pressed mostly flat. “- _that_ , and then spray on some of that nicer synthskin stuff, and it’ll turn out fine. We could even ask her. We could ask her _right now_.”

“Or I could just have some alone time.”

She scowled at me. “I know it’s been a whole week since you’ve killed any scary monsters or whatever, but there _is_ still a fucking war on.”

I ignored that. “I’m also not entirely sure what to think about the fact that I probably got daemon… _goop_ … in my wounds.”

“I expect that’s what all the holy water was for, dear.”

See, now _that_ was reassuring. I must have perked up to some noticeable degree, because I got an ‘attagirl’ and my hair ruffled.

I pouted about that for a few moments, but my thoughts drifted to prayer seals and meltaguns, and considered that there were few things more therapeutic than a good, thorough cleansing in flame.

And what better to purify than the remains of the unholy?

“I- here, help me with this.” I said, and turned around so Simmons could fix my brassiere with any sort of speed at all. She obliged, and I asked, “What happened to all the heretics?”

Simmons took my chin with two fingers and made me look her in the face. “We shot them to death, Sis.”

I blinked at her, a bit taken aback. “Obviously, but were they disposed of, or?”

“In the Guard – in Drop regiments, at least – we tend to consider the enemy ‘disposed of’ when we’ve finished shooting them to death.” The way she said this made me think it was probably in a training manual or somesuch.

“Praise the Emperor,” I cheered – though I kept it down, somebody could well have been using the loo – “I wanna burn’em.”

Simmons stared at me, as though trying to figure out why this idea was bad, but seemed to see reason: it was productive _and_ good stress-relief. Instead, as I squirmed back into my shirt, she asked, “Is it a good idea to let you try and haul dead bodies around in your state?”

“No,” I admitted, “but what are you going to do, _stop me_?”

She must not have liked her odds of managing that very much, because she hooked a thumb through the strap on her long-las and waited expectantly.

Not even a minute after we left the cover of behind-the-shower-boxes, a little boy in civilian clothes came rushing along, a small stack of data-slates in-hand. He proffered one, and I licked the pad of my thumb, rubbed a bit of dirt from his cheek, and _then_ took it.

Simmons snorted as the boy scarpered, and, when he had vanished around a stack of groundcar tires, stored for makeshift reinforcement of fortifications if things got hectic (I assumed, given the lack of groundcars), she quipped, “Okay, _mom_.”

Then, I looked at the ‘slate.

“… Simmons, do we have a demolitions expert?”

Simmons scratched her chin. “Er. Maybe? Does what’s-her-face count?”

I blinked at the taller woman. “You know, I feel bad for not knowing half of the squad after being around for a week.”

My insult was met primarily with a rude gesture and a, “She’s mousy and quiet and carries a lasgun, and can’t hit the broad side of a Space Marine’s backside-”

“That’s blasphemy,” I chided, and pinched her arm.

“Well, I’ve never seen a friendly one, whaddya want from me?”

In all fairness, _I_ hadn’t, either, and would later end up being very rude to some very understanding Astartes as a result (I really am sorry about that, Sergeant, if you’re reading this!), so I just sort of frowned and nodded and got back to the task at hand. “So, okay, the squad is you, Sarge, the other marksman-”

“Clark,” Simmons supplied helpfully.

“Clark,” I repeated, “got it. Then there’s Sunny, Enginseer Fiolina, Prettyboy-”

“Marseille, I think.”

“Right. Then there’s Doc Tudor, Trooper Donal-”

“The FNG.”

I snorted and countered, “I’m greener than him.”

She didn’t argue that, and got a strange sort of faraway look in her eye – I didn’t know what to do about that but try and press on, keep things normal. Simmons was a proud woman, very blatantly so, and I worried asking if she was quite alright wouldn’t make things worse. Show her that she was showing it and so on.

“Then there’s the team on the Heavy Bolter, and- wait. Did you mean that girl who got replacement glasses the other day? Kinda pasty, messy brown hair?”

“Glasses?” Repeated Simmons, a bit numbly, and I nodded.

“They might technically be goggles, they have a strap and all.”

A mischievous grin boded ill for the poor riflewoman, but well for Simmons, who seemed to have the life breathed back into her body by the mere thought of troublemaking. “Well, we know her name, then.”

“Are you going to bully her?”

Simmons barked out a laugh. “Are _you_ going to kiss her?”

I folded my arms across my chest (carefully), and the sharpshooter put an arm over my shoulder. “Listen, she wears glasses and looks like a nerd, she’s bound to at least be smart enough to set some charges. Now- _you_ go get put in your big girl suit, and I’ll track down Goggles and find enough det-packs for...” She took a moment to peer down at the data-slate, then grimaced. “We’ll find as much as we can. Vox me when you’re done?”

A nod was all the woman needed.

Fifteen minutes later, I was lowering a ceramite helm onto my head. Void-seals pressurized, displays flickered to life in my vision, and a weapon was pressed into my hands as a trio of tech-priests swarmed around me. Another readout, in the lower right corner of my field-of-view, joined the others.

‘BOLTER, GODWYN-DE’AZ,’ it read, and listed beneath that was my weapon’s serial number. The weapon I’d been issued and had carried ever since. A cute little picture of its silhouette floated beneath that, and an ammunition counter coalesced beside it as the cogboys did their holy rituals and rites and coaxed the machine spirits to interface.

Then another reading. ‘COMBI-MELTA, UNDERMOUNT, GODWYN-DE’AZ’.

And a silhouette of said combi-melta joined the list, under my bolter, and an ammunition counter joined it, and targeting reticles flashed on and off again in a rite of functionality-testing.

Each tech-priest was uttering a prayer under their breath, and, in this, I joined them. There was a reverie I could not deny, and I offered up veneration to the Bolter, the Flamer, and the Melta, holy instruments of our holy charge, may the enemy ever quake to hear their bark and roar and hiss alike.

… Which is basically the prayer, and I could have put that into dialogue form, but- the zealot thing isn’t a joke, you know? Sometimes I get swept up in prayer, even just recording it. It works, though, doesn’t it? I actually like the effect, reading it back to myself- it feels like what I was feeling then, in that moment of religious euphoria.

The work of the Emperor’s hand in this was clear, for coincidence is seldom quite so generous, and I needed no explanation from Him to know with absolute certainty that my gun was His, wherever He might will it.

I prayed, that He might be reassured of the depth and purity of my faith. That He might place His trust in me, as I placed mine in Him.

Do not take that as arrogance, or some sort of misguided belief that I was some fundamental and essential part of something, that the God-Emperor himself had chosen me to win a war, and the rest was all details. Large numbers that represented the number of Guardsmen lost in the conflict, to quantify what I had been through, or how doomed everyone had been until I arrived, or otherwise used as juxtaposition in some groxshit attempt to prop myself up as a world-saving hero.

War isn’t about contrived situations in which everything hinges upon one vital _thing_ , where it’s all come down to the wire and the galaxy/segmentum/sector/system/world/city/regiment/squad hangs in the balance. It’s not about making some brilliant play for the all-important _thing_ because the enemy, a gaggle of insane morons who _put spikes in their brains_ , are obsessed with it.

War is about taking the shitty frakking situation you’ll inevitably end up in, and asking yourselves, “What _can_ we do?”

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the super special bomb, or the big spaceship, or the support of the Astartes, or whatever. What you can’t do doesn’t matter. You can’t do it. Instead of giving up, consider what you can do. Think about ways to enable yourself to do whatever it is, or to accomplish your goals without it. There’s an old saying that elucidates this, elegant and succint, which I hope to impress upon you: _‘Improvise, adapt, overcome.’_

I was one among millions, but I was the one I had control over, and the only soldier on-hand with a meltagun and power armor. I was a weapon, and a weapon is a tool. Leo, Sunny, Simmons and Sarge were all just as important as I- Sarge moreso, and Reese moreso than he. My power armor was just another aspect of me-as-a-tool. A quality, a trait.

I prayed not in hopes of heroism, but to steel myself and make known my willingness to serve.

In hindsight, that’s the sort of thing that is obviously not necessary, but, hey- better safe than sorry.

A little fleur-de-lis charm hung from the pistol-grip of my bolter, which I admittedly adored, and a chainsword was suspended, opposite my sidearm, by belt and baldric. Fuel canisters for the combi-melta joined my webgear, stark and spartan against the string of glimmering adamantium beads about my waist, and my Sarissa, now not really practical to mount, was sheathed just below my chainsword.

The helm was stock-standard Sabbat Pattern, with all that entails. Psycho-ocular buffering, to prevent sensory overload in any environment, an integrated photo-visor for night-vision and protection (by way of active polarization) against flashbangs and the like. Strobe lights, you might be interested to know, actually trigger and are suppressed by both systems, which I find pretty neat. Preysight mode allows thermal imaging, visual magnification is built-in, and I already touched on the targeting module, which can be used for all sorts of shooting-related things. The communications suite contains both a comm-link and a data-uplink, the former of which allows one to speak with people, while the latter provides mapping and navigational aids and allows techpriests and officers and such to do all kinds of things I’m sure they’re thrilled about doing. The helm itself is built with some degree of psy-nullification in mind, which makes Battle-Sisters even more frightening to witches than we already were, and I honestly find that delightful.

It’s also good for head-butting.

Not that I would ever be so brash as to end up in a situation where headbutting the enemy was on the table, so to speak.

A few minutes were spent getting all the retinal display whatsits calibrated, which was mostly me following instructions from the techpriests. One interesting bit was the difference between blinking and… flexing(?) my eye at things, which let me- well, _interface_ with the interface in different ways. The subvocalization stuff was odd, but ‘think the command out loud’ was remarkably helpful advice, though something like, ‘think in words’ or… I don’t know, it was just a strange conversation until it clicked. The throat-mic was rather more straightforward- it’s the same kit tankers and pilots use, it lets you talk without having to consider background noise or the volume of your voice- you can whisper to a comrade from a kilometer away.

If you couldn’t tell, I was pretty pleased with the new equipment I’d been… issued?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Ok bottom"  
> -everyone
> 
> (simmons hot)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a calm precedes a storm. As is custom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god i forgot that simmons is hot help me

The younger of our sharpshooters picked up the vox just as I left the Quartermaster’s prefab.

“Simmons,” I said in greeting.

“Yvie.” Came the terse response.

Behind my second, ceramite face, I grimaced. “That bad, huh?”

“Yeah,” Simmons replied glumly, “that bad.”

Goggles cut in, then, her higher and slightly-squeaky register standing in stark contrast to the rather huskier voice of our markswoman. “Three AP mines,” she dutifully reported.

“Listen, it’s fine- there was a combi-melta in one of the crates of our wargear, and the tech-priests decided to mount it to my bolter. We’re good to go, and up a couple APers mines to boot. I’m comfortable calling that a win.”

Simmons let out an appreciative whistle. “ _Throne_ , Tin Man, how come the Emperor loves you so much more than the rest of us?”

It was clear from her tone that she was almost entirely joking. Not to mention the moniker ‘Tin Man’.

“Well, if you think about it, we’re His shield, right? She’s one of the Emperor’s _Daughters._ So if we’re an instrument of His will, then she’s, like, a herald, or an angel, or… something.”

“She’s right,” I replied dryly, “that’s the _second_ maxim of the Sororitas. _‘The God-Emperor is your new Dad, and He’s taller, stronger,_ and _cooler than that guy who used to be your dad, the one who died or whatever.’_ Behind closed doors, we actually call Him the Dad-Emperor.”

A moment of stunned silence followed, and was interrupted with a prompt, “She’s just giving you shit, rookie.”

I arrived at the gate at about that point, and we three hooligans linked up and moved to purge the everliving hell out of that evil axe.

The guardsmen covered me as I leveled my gun at the head of the weapon, with its spikes and wavy edges. There was a sizzling _**hiss**_ of flash-boiling water vapor as I fired, followed instantaneously by a great, roaring _WHOOSH_ as the holy energies of a wave of nuclear fire struck true. The moniker ‘Fusion Gun’ was surely appropriate, but anyone who has seen the results of a Meltagun’s blessed work will understand that no name could be more apt than ‘Melta’.

Indeed, my target had simply ceased to exist, and in the wake of my weapon, only a cylindrical void in molten rockcrete remained. A hole, cut at a fairly shallow angle, which mostly closed itself off as the liquefied stone flowed slowly down to fill the gap.

It was then that my weapon truly became an instrument of righteous purification, and then that I understood that it and I were inextricably linked. We would be judgment, and I would carry it always. It was the Emperor’s will, and my Emperor was wise indeed.

  


* * *

  


Since I had been freed from the clutches of the evil Sister Reese, with her ‘medicine’ and ‘genuine concern’ both she and myself were finally able to go home. Insofar as anything other than the convent _could_ be home, of course. Eighth Squad, as would become ever more apparent as time went on, was easily the next-best thing, and just about the only other ‘home’ I’d ever know.

We belonged, somehow.

So, no shit, there we were. Home, sitting around a fire built outside the squad’s tent. I sipped tea from my canteen cup, and asked the flames, “So, that Ogryn fellow- did he make it?”

I wasn’t breaking a silence so much as a natural lull in conversation. We were safe, secure, regrouped and sporting no wounds (some of us were still lightly-injured, sure, but nothing that would impede us in any meaningful way). The sun had set, the weird green moon hung stationary in the starry night sky, and we were able to relax.

Leo was nibbling away at a block of some dehydrated ration component and trying to pretend to be displeased that Simmons had fallen asleep with her red head on the Hospitaler’s shoulder, while Sarge ate his meal warmed and rehydrated like a sane person. The Non-com’s gaze would fall upon me from time to time- checking to make sure I was eating, no doubt- and then flit around the rest of the squad before returning to his food.

Fiolina was knitting a crimson, cog-print scarf, warbling a quiet binary song which had probably contributing to putting half the squad to sleep as Smiles the servo-skull blup-blup-blup’d in place and held the far end of her work aloft.

The crates of our – ‘our’ as in ‘Sororitas’ – equipment had contained plenty of rations to take care of Leo and I for the next seven or so millennia, as well as fresh clothes and such.

For some reason, the Guardsmen seemed almost as afraid of Sororitas-issue rations as they were my new scars.

Rumor had begun to spread the moment I took my eye off of Simmons, after we’d erased the daemonic axe. Though perhaps ‘warning’ is a better word for it. The Elysians had inquired no more about my scars than was polite for scars that didn’t resemble flames, insignias, or the frakking Emperor (Sister Kelliya had one of those, it was pretty cool), and several of them suggested Elysian folk remedies for burn scars, which I politely declined.

Perhaps more tellingly, the two Chimera wrecks had been blown to smithereens with demolitions charges when I just so happened to be passing by, or looking in the right direction. Nobody had tried to lie to me about it so much as… act as if it had been mere coincidence that I was nearby when they carried out their task, which they’d nonchalantly shrugged about when asked. Further inquiry got investigative minds told that it had been ‘probably authorized’, and that their demolitions troopers were ‘pretty responsible, really,’ with their expenditure of high explosives.

“Oh, Buddy?” Chimed Leo, “He made it out fine. Plenty of broken bones, and some trauma from being picked up and thrown, but all were easy to set and let mend with a bit of help, and wrestling a daemon didn’t seem to have bothered him all that much compared to the idea that there exist creatures that can pick up a full-grown Ogryn and hurl him like a scrumball.”

“I guess a Leman Russ would probably be pretty shaken-up if someone lifted and subsequently threw it, too,” I mused, and returned to my grox and mashed tubers.

I lapsed into quiet, then, my thoughts drifting to Palatine Croix, and the matter of just what her fate would be. How did specters and warp-ghosts even work? Was she tainted? Who’s to say it was even really _her_?

Pulling me from my thoughts, Dillons sort of tentatively nudged me and asked, “Um, Yvie?”

I turned to look at the man. With his carapace helmet off, his hair was free to become as fluffy and sandy-brown as it pleased, though the flickering orange firelight cast its colors askew as surely as everything else. The very-subtly-shifting shadows had a slightly strange effect, too, lending an odd cast to his pretty face.

“What’s up, Sunny?”

“Well,” he began, “I obviously know _of_ Meltaguns, but we don’t have a whole lot of them in the 36th-” He lifted his plasma gun a bit to emphasize it. “How does it stack up? What’s your actual range? And the armor penetration- how good is a Munitorum _‘very good’_ rating _actually?_ ”

I thought on that for a minute, tried to recall weapons handling courses from the Schola. “Effective range is something like twenty meters, maximum about eighty. Optimal range is ten or so, so that the- well, so the heat is still hot. Within ten-ish meters, a Meltagun will penetrate about four times as much armor as your Plasma gun, and outside of that, about double. It also does a fair bit more damage, just because the jet – or blast, whatever you want to call it – is much broader. Maybe twenty to thirty centimeters, depending on the gun and how it’s set up? I’ve seen our Seraphim practice with their Inferno pistols, they’ll do fifteen or twenty centimeters. Our normal-issue Meltaguns do thirty-ish, and a Multi-melta puts a hole about a meter wide in things. But my combi-melta is a bit smaller, and it looked like twenty-five centimeters or so when I made that daemon’s axe disappear.”

The Plasma gunner not only weathered my miniature lecture, but listened with apparent interest, and whistled appreciatively in a few places.

In the back of my mind, part of me wondered if it was weird that I had not only taken the proscribed singing classes for Sororitas Novitiates, but also later elective courses, and hadn’t ever actually learned to whistle.

“You could slag a tank.” Sunny noted, and I grinned.

“I wanna slag a tank reeeal bad.”

“Hey!” Sarge interjected. “Nobody even _thinks_ about getting close to an enemy tank without orders from myself or the LT. And especially not without cover and concealment.”

“Indeed,” added Reese. “I realize I’m a miracle worker and all, but there is such a thing as pushing your luck.”

“Is that specifically an order not to do so when an officer tells me to?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely, Solaris.”

My grin broadened, and I saluted the man across the fire. “ _Ave, Imperator_.”

Our broad-shouldered NCO chewed thoughtfully. Then, he sat forward a bit, and asked, “Which one of you jokers is gonna tell me what she called me? Reese?”

His tone was neutral, and I burst into titters.

Leo rolled her eyes and shook her head. Didn’t do a damn thing to hide her smile, though. Her gaze flickered over to me momentarily, probably just to steal a beat from my heart – seeing as that’s precisely what she did.

Heedless of the harmless palpitation she had provoked, she answered the man. “ _Imperator_ is easy, it just means commander. I’d translate _ave_ as ‘hail’. It’s an exclamation, usually, and is a greeting, praise, and assent. It’s used as all three in the Sisterhood- often all at once, especially by the Militants. Sometimes, it’s ‘Praise the Emperor!’ and other times – _this_ time? It was ‘Yes, Sir.’”

“Huh.” The man grunted thoughtfully. Then, curious and perhaps a bit proud, he said, “You don’t suppose I could get you saluting like a proper Guardsman, do you, Solaris?”

“Not a chance in hell, sir.” I replied, and the NCO shrugged.

The mousy girl Simmons had dubbed ‘Goggles’ sidled up to the fire, setting a ration cup partially-filled with water down on a little sheet-metal grate on four triangular legs. She carefully adjusted its height, putting it- I dunno, maybe 5-8cm off of the bed of coals that had been extracted from the fire itself. When she sat back, away from the hot coals, to do meal prep while her water boiled, I addressed her.

“Goggles, when you asked where I’m from, was that small talk or genuine curiosity? I can tell you some about it, if you want.”

She brightened a bit at that, and shot me a smile. “Oh, would you?”

I nodded. “I was raised at the Schola Progenium on Ascalon, in the Keriyot sector- it’s a fortress world, established to help safeguard the system. Saint Katherine’s Star, I mean. The system is called Saint Katherine’s Star, ‘system’ isn’t actually in the name-”

“Bet that causes _so much_ trouble,” commented the smaller of the heavy weapons team, aptly named ‘Smalls’, and most of us who were still awake had a bit of a laugh.

“So, I grew up on Ascalon. When I graduated, I went to one of the Convent Priori- for me, that was the Convent Prioris on Ophelia VII.” I paused. “There’re two Convent Priori. _The_ Convent Prioris, on Holy Terra, and the Convent Sanctorum, on Ophelia VII. If that clears things up.” I cleared my throat. “Um- after finishing my final training and education there, I was sent back to St. Katherine’s Star, to the Orders of the Gilded Lily on Shrine of Saint Katherine. It’s a Shrine World, if you couldn’t guess, and it’s home. There’s a convent of the Order of Our Martyred Lady on-world, too, for obvious reasons.”

Goggles seemed excited at this, and chirped, “You got to go home!”

Do you ever have moments where everything is just… suddenly put in perspective? Where someone shines a whole different light on everything, and you realize everything is actually ten degrees to the left of where you thought it was?

When Goggles said those words to me, I learned something about the world. Something fundamental. The sort of thing that makes my blood run cold with fury.

That girl knew – not _thought_ , _**knew**_ – she would never see Elysia again. In her mind, that was fact. Wind blows, rain falls, the strong survive, and Guardsmen never go home.

I looked up at the lime-green moon. Arabella’s Vigil, it was called, though I didn’t know that at the time. So-named because of the close relationship of Saints Mina and Arabella, of course – _Arabella always had one eye on Mina,_ as they say, _and Mina always had a hand_ _on_ _Arabella._

Mina’s Stead was one of the twin worlds of the Roseus system, along with Arabella’s Grace and its moon, Mina’s Touch.

There were, I thought, an awful lot of people on Mina’s Stead who wouldn’t be going home. People _from_ Mina’s Stead who wouldn’t be going home, too, on-world and off-.

As I stared up at the satellite, I sensed a strange sort of… attention. As though I was being regarded; _considered_. Like a spiritual spotlight had paused to linger on me.

Tears welled in my eyes for a moment, but were blinked away, and my lips began to move, mouth and tongue forming words I didn’t know to speak. Words I didn’t realize I had ordered them to make – words I’m not so sure I had ordered them to make in the first place.

“Watch me, Saint Arabella.” I said faintly, my voice a hoarse whisper, and my shoulderblades itched like they had when I’d first gotten my tattoos.

Not ‘watch over me’. ‘Watch me.’

Determination boiled up within me, and what I had first said faintly, in a voice almost not my own, I now said with _conviction_ _ **:**_

_**“Watch me.”** _

I made the words mine. Said them with purpose. With _my_ voice.

The itching turned searing hot in the span of a second, then faded as quickly as it had come.

I was without words for the rest of the night. I… whether or not I could have spoken, I can’t say.

I slept in my armor, and dreamt of the Saints.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative determined speech: "Notice me Arabella~"

**Author's Note:**

> In the next chapter, she gets punched by Will Smith, with a cry of, 'WELCOME TO MINA'S STEAD!'


End file.
